Kate > Kate's Quotes

“The coast redwood is a so-called relict species. It is a tiny remnant of a life form that once spread in splendor and power across the face of nature. The redwood has settled down in California to live near the sea, the way many retired people do.”
― Richard Preston

“He was older and loved to play Eric Clapton's single "Change the World" on repeat while we snorted cocaine off the side of his pool table with lucky $2 bills.”
― Christina McDowell

“His words of multimillion-dollar film deals were like dominoes tumbling out of his mouth, and all I wanted him to do was shut up and drive faster.”
― Christina McDowell, After Perfect: A Daughter's Memoir

“It was as if his life's work had slipped away unfinished before he had even been born. All he could find, at best, were a few remnants of a lost world.”
― Richard Preston

“... tree has had a stroke, and its top dies. A redwood can deal with a stroke. It simply grows a new top in a few centuries.”
― Richard Preston

“The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in a ruined world ...”
― Richard Preston

“During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish.”
― Richard Preston

“Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson.”
― Richard Preston

“He filled his stomach three times a day with the roasted meat that he and Park had fantasized about in Camp 14. He bathed with soap and hot water. He got rid of the lice he had lived with since birth.”
― Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

“Defectors frequently quit jobs found for them by the government and start businesses that fail. Some newcomers are disgusted by what they see as the decadence and inequality of life in the South. So to find employers who will put up with the prickliness of newcomers from the North, the Ministry of Unification pays companies up to eighteen hundred dollars a year if they risk hiring a defector.”
― Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

“People are not so interested,’ Kim Sang-hun, director of the Database Center, told the Christian Science Monitor after his organization published the book. ‘The indifference of South Korean society to the issue of North Korean rights is so awful.”
― Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

“Shin and many other North Korean defectors complain, with considerable justification, that South Koreans view them as ill-educated, badly spoken and poorly dressed bumpkins whose mess of a country is more trouble than it’s worth.”
― Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

“It is just a matter of time,’ Shin told me, before North Korea decides to destroy the camps. ‘I hope that the United States, through pressure and persuasion, can convince [the North Korean government] not to murder all those people in the camps.”
― Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

“Faced with developing a brand-new social network [after having moved cross-country to a new city], her approach was: Show up to everything; talk to everyone.”
― Melody Warnick, This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live

“My father was sent to get the shoes. The pink of the leather turned out to be a lighter shade than I'd hoped, it looked like the underside of a kitten, and the sole was a dirty gray cat's tongue, and there were no long pink satin ribbons to criss-cross over the ankles, no, only a sad little elastic strap which my father had sewn on himself.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“We set off walking backwards, thumbs out, trying to hitchhike to the postoperative breast augmentation appointment, perhaps a first in the state of Iowa.”
― Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty

“At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was going something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all.”
― Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty

“Lucy was invisible, exuberant, and utterly birdlike in her wild, darting freedom.”
― Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty

“She ate from my plates and wore my clothes and slept in my bed like Goldilocks while the benevolent, lumbering bear went south for the holidays.”
― Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty

“When Lucy believed that there were actually things in the world that were worse than what had happened to her, she could pull herself up on this knowledge like a rope. When she lost sight of it, she sank.”
― Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still posses one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“Marry a person who loves you a lot, but more important, loves you best, because quality beats quantity any day.”
― Nora McInerny Purmort, It's Okay to Laugh

“You won’t do it because you are Superwoman, you’ll do it because it’s your life, and there is nobody who can live it for you.”
― Nora McInerny Purmort, It's Okay to Laugh

“Megan squeezed her eyelids closed, blocking out the darkness that was his hair and the pain of the past.”
― Robin Schone, A Man And A Woman

“Pride was a little thing to sacrifice if it would give him back the joy that had been taken away from him.”
― Robin Schone, A Man And A Woman

“He stared at the clear spring water, and wondered why he had brought Megan to Madron Well. The truth chuckled and bubbled out from underneath the rock.”
― Robin Schone, A Man And A Woman