Kat > Kat's Quotes

“I find it hard to talk about myself. I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I? paradox. Sure, no one knows as much pure data about me as me. But when I talk about myself, all sorts of other factors--values, standards, my own limitations as an observer--make me, the narrator, select and eliminate things about me, the narratee. I've always been disturbed by the thought that I'm not painting a very objective picture of myself.

This kind of thing doesn't seem to bother most people. Given the chance, people are surprisingly frank when they talk about themselves. "I'm honest and open to a ridiculous degree," they'll say, or "I'm thin-skinned and not the type who gets along easily in the world." Or "I am very good at sensing others' true feelings." But any number of times I've seen people who say they've easily hurt other people for no apparent reason. Self-styled honest and open people, without realizing what they're doing, blithely use some self-serving excuse to get what they want. And those "good at sensing others' true feelings" are duped by the most transparent flattery. It's enough to make me ask the question: How well do we really know ourselves?

The more I think about it, the more I'd like to take a rain check on the topic of me. What I'd like to know more about is the objective reality of things outside myself. How important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it. That's how I'd grasp a clearer sense of who I am.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Maybe I had a "secret identity", but then when you think about it, don't we all? A part of ourselves very few people ever get to see. The part we think of as "me". The part that deals with the big stuff. Makes the real choices. The part everything else is a reflection of.”
― Kurt Busiek, Superman: Secret Identity

“Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“He must have known I'd want to leave you."
"No, he must have known you would always want to come back.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Gram made me go to the doctor
to see if there was something wrong
with my heart.
After a bunch of tests, the doctor said:
Lennie, you lucked out.
I wanted to punch him in the face,
but instead I started to cry
in a drowning kind of way.
I couldn't believe
I had a lucky heart
when what I wanted
was the same kind of heart
as Bailey.
I didn't hear Gram come in,
or come up behind me,
just felt her arms slip around my shaking frame,
then the press of both her hands hard
against my chest, holding it all in,
holding me together.
Thank God she whispered,
before the doctor or I
could utter a word.
How could she possibly have known
that I'd gotten good news?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“I mean, what if love isn't a yes-or-no question? It's not either you're in love or you're not. I mean, aren't there different levels? And maybe these things, like words and expectations and whatever, don't go on top of the love. Maybe it's like a map, and they all have their own place, and then when you see it from the sky - whoa.”
― David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“The important people in our lives leave imprints. They may stay or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart. There's not getting over that.”
― David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“So what else can I tell you?" I asked. "I mean, to get you to reveal Lily to me."
She triangled her fingers under her chin. "Let's see. Are you a bed wetter?"
"Am I a...?"
"Bed wetter. I am asking if you are a bed wetter."
I knew she was trying to get me to blink. But I wouldn't.
"No, ma'am. I leave my beds dry."
"Not even a little drip every now and then?"
"I'm trying hard to see how this is germane."
"I'm gauging your honesty. What is the last periodical you read methodically?"
"Vogue. Although, in the interest of full disclosure, that's mostly because I was in my mother's bathroom, enduring a rather long bowel movement. You know, the kind that requires Lamaze."
"What adjective do you feel the most longing for?"
That was easy. "I will admit I have a soft spot for fanciful."
"Let's say I have a hundred million dollars and offer it to you. The only condition is that if you take it, a man in China will fall off his bicycle and die. What do you do?"
"I don't understand why it matters whether he's in China or not. And of course I wouldn't take the money."
The old woman nodded.
"Do you think Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual?"
"All I can say for sure is that he never made a pass at me."
"Are you a museumgoer?"
"Is the pope a churchgoer?"
"When you see a flower painted by Georgia O'Keefe, what comes to mind?"
"That's just a transparent ploy to get me to say the word vagina, isn't it? There. I said it. Vagina.”
― David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“Each time someone dies, a library burns.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“When I'm with him,
there is someone with me
in my house of grief,
someone who knows
its architecture as I do,
who can walk with me,
from room to sorrowful room,
making the whole rambling structure
of wind and emptiness
not quite as scary, as lonely
as it was before.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when the grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
― Robert Fulghum, True Love

“Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.”
― Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

“Nothing is fun until you're good at it.”
― Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

“Do you know what a foreign accent is? It's a sign of bravery.”
― Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

“But just because you love something, I added to myself, doesn't mean you'll ever be great. Not if you don't work. Most people stink at the things they love.”
― Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“It’s pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy Pride.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running