Katie > Katie's Quotes

“You have to do normal things or they don't go away. You have to reassure them. Or they just stand there staring at you, as if you're a car-crash, or pornography.”
― Rupert Thomson, The Insult

“I tell you this because you must understand, no matter the point of our talk, that I didn't always have things, but I had people -- I always had people. I had a mother and father who I would match against any other. I had a brother who looked out for me all through college. I had The Mecca that directed me. I had friends who would leap in front of a bus for me. You need to know that I was loved, that whatever my lack of religious feeling, I have always loved my people and that broad love is directly related to the specific love I feel for you.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful -- the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“Writers' bodies don't make sense in a place like Hollywood: soft and white, defenseless in a town where everyone's defended, right up to their celluloid tits.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“Is language all about desire? Is desire all about loss? Would we ever need to say anything if we never lost anything? Is everything we ever say just another way to express: I will lose this, I will lose all of this. I will lose you?”
― Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You

“It is easy to love a woman, it is in nature, but art to love a man, and a profound art to want to put your horse in another man's stall.”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

“A smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September

“Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for.”
― Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

“Halley believed that a kiss was the beginning of a story, the story, good or bad, short or long, of an us, and once begun, you had to follow it through to the end.”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“His writing had become, like a stash of rare and troubling pornography, something that must be kept hidden, an obsession that other people would be mystified to discover.”
― Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang

“I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody -- you're all so bored. You've 'ad nature explained to you and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the living body explained to you and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the universe explained to you and you're bored with it. So now you just want cheap thrills and like plenty of 'em, and it dun't matter 'ow tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new, as long as it's new, as long as it flashes and fuckin' bleeps in forty fuckin' different colours. Well, whatever else you can say about me, I'm not fuckin' bored!”
― Mike Leigh, Naked and Other Screenplays

“I am following my fishie. La la laaaa. Because my fish knows where to go. My fish is the Borghal Rantipole who I made look like a fishie because I am so clever and I can do things like that if I want... La la la... It knows many thingummies. The Borghal Rantipole that is. And now it is inconspicuous too as well.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Absolute Sandman, Volume 4

“The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You

“You don't have time to chitty-chat with loose women. We have work to do. And you have to save humanity. That's a lot of shit to get done.”
― Peter Bognanni, The House of Tomorrow

“The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“They had dreams but they called them dreams because they were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown, an impossibility, they would never come true.”
― James Frey, Bright Shiny Morning

“We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes

“On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Best of Frederik Pohl

“I hated the soup and felt little for the can.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Everything began with a single breath. A light wind that started a sway, and the sway started a turn, and the turn... The turn started everything.”
― Jim McCann, Return of the Dapper Men

“Three rebellions ago, the air was fresher. The soft pasting noises of the rebel billposters remind us of Oklahoma, where everything is still the same.”
― Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“A bluebear has twenty-seven lives. I shall recount thirteen-and-a-half of them in this book but keep quiet about the rest. A bear must have his secrets, after all; they make him seem attractive and mysterious.”
― Walter Moers, The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

“The seamen had whitewashed the smoky ceilings of the ward, and that dear homely smell carried the vividness of thatch and lumpy walls and stew given from the goodness of a stranger's heart. But that was all there was of comfort, and the salt air had turned from cold to warm in the passing of a life, an afternoon.”
― Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America