katherine > katherine's Quotes

“Once again love drives me on, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet creature against which nothing can be done.”
― Sappho

“As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.”
― Jenny Slate

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
― Marcel Proust

“Please come close enough so that I can see you, and then I will try to do the rest for both of us, because I have not learned my lesson yet and do not possess the faith to believe in the partner who does his side of the thing. But I would love it if you would, because that would be dreamy and then I would also have that faith. I will give you every single treat.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“If you let me onto your land, I might be very wild, and I will not be able to totally change myself, but you can always track me by the tinkle of my lively clamor.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“Happiness is not negated by subsequent pain. But it does make the possibility for future happiness seem dimmer. Every good moment is shadowed by the question of that moment's longevity.”
― Joseph Fink, Alice Isn't Dead

“boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; So I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves; independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion. And what is gained is loss.”
― Edward Albee, The American Dream & The Zoo Story

“Then one day, you learned that rapture could also mean blissful happiness, and you understood, fully, that it is important to live in unyielding fear with a smile on your face.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Eros, again now, the loosener of limbs troubles me,

Bittersweet, sly, uncontrollable creature….”
― Sappho

“The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I am' includes all that has made me so. It is more than a statement of immediate fact: it is already an explanation, a justification, a demand - it is already autobiographical.”
― John Berger, About Looking

“I believe in the future. I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it. I believe in unfathomable quantities of nourishment.”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees

“Personally, I long to be a canceled rich man because that is just a vacation.”
― Ziwe,, Black Friend: Essays

“Can we put aside our training in political correctness and let pain, that inarticulate beast, sound its impossible noise? Can we listen together differently?”
― Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You

“Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“I have to go back/ to that wet black thing/ dead in the road. I have to turn around./ I must put my face in it.”
― Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems

“So they debated, willing things to be as they had always been, unwilling to know that events are made by men, and that men had changed.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“In the midst of severe pain, I practiced my own death. I died over and over again becoming one with mystery, no boundaries remaining between this form I call my body and the cosmos.”
― Eva Tuschman Leonard, Bodywork

“But guilt at the missing details hampered my ability to remember, forced me to put off asking more detailed questions. It was already clear that I would one day (when I became that better version of myself) open a special notebook and sit down with my mother, and she would start at the very beginning, and then there would be some meaning to it all – and a system, a family tree, and every cousin and nephew would be in their rightful place, and at the end of it there would be a book.”
― Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory

“Instead of one, the only, photograph, there are hundreds. No one, not even the photographer, manages to look at every snap: it would take years. But it doesn't matter, the important thing is to store all these many moments, to keep them safe for the Great Looking, the Grand Viewer who has all the time and attention in the world, more than would fit in any lifetime, and who will draw all that has happened into one line of events. There is no one else to do it.”
― Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory