Kate > Kate's Quotes

“Do thou amend thy face, and I'll amend my life.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“It is a truth universally unacknowledged that when the dead are trying to remember something, the living are trying harder to forget it.”
― Jess Kidd, Himself

“Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections.”
― Jane Austen

“Wow. Whoops. Sorry. ... I just lost two hours inside a YouTube kitten warp.”
― Douglas Coupland, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present

“There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“In desperate situations, when the normal framework of social order breaks down, ordinary people are rarely as lacking in common sense as those who govern them; the instinct for self-preservation is too strong.”
― A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster, 1609 - 1969

“But realize this: we are living through writing’s Cambrian explosion, not its mass extinction. Language is more varied than ever before, even if some of it is directly copied from the clipboard—variety is the preservation of an art, not a threat to it.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“I never want to see umbrellas around me," he [Mussolini] once said. "The umbrella is a bourgeois relic, it is the arm used by the pope's soldiers. A people who carry umbrellas cannot found an empire.”
― David I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe

“My geekness is a-quivering.”
― Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two

“That's how vilification works. The victim ingests the views of his tormentor. If that's how I look, that's what I must be.”
― Howard Jacobson, Shylock Is My Name