Kathryn > Kathryn's Quotes

“Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“I grabbed my book and opened it up.

I wanted to smell it.

Heck, I wanted to kiss it.

Yes, kiss it.

That's right, I am a book kisser.

Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“To speak of it would be giving importance to something that has none.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“You should approach each book -- you should approach life -- with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.”
― Jincy Willett, The Writing Class

“It seems to me it's always the evil we refuse to see that does us the greatest harm.”
― Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism

“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Yes, you are nosy. You're a dreadfully nosy, horribly bossy, appallingly clean old woman. Control yourself. You're victimizing us all.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”
― Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“A sense of humor...is superior to any religion so far devised.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“We all have faults, mine is being wicked.”
― James Thurber

“Important events — whether serious, happy or unfortunate — do not change a man's soul, they merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows off all its leaves. Such events highlight what is hidden in the shadows, they nudge the spirit towards a place where it can flourish.”
― Irene Nemirovsky

“After all, people judge one another according to their own feelings. It is only the miser who sees other enticed by money, the lustful who see others obsessed by desire.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“Heureux sont ceux qui peuvent aimer et haïr sans feinte, sans détour, sans nuance.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.”
― Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and other stories

“Each man, when he dies, sees the landscape of his own soul.”
― Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death

“My attic study is full of books, around a thousand of them, of which I might have read a half, the others lie in wait; some were bought years ago and are destined to remain unread, others were consumed as soon as I brought them home. Some , more ancient acquisitions, glare back at me accusingly, claiming their right to be read, to be given the chance to relieve me of some particularly acute area of ignorance , of which I possess legion, there is never enough time to read all these books , there never will be time enough, there is never enough time in one life to read everything.”
― Richard Gwyn, The Vagabond's Breakfast

“Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.”
― Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me?”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it...

In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times