Kate > Kate's Quotes

“The truth is, Rosemary, that you are capable of anything. Good or bad. You always have been, and you always will be. Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us. You think every soldier who picked up a cutter gun was a bad person? No. She was just doing what the soldier next to her was doing, who was doing what the soldier next to her was doing, and so on and so on. And I bet most of them — not all, but most — who made it through the war spent a long time after trying to understand what they’d done. Wondering how they ever could have done it in the first place. Wondering when killing became so comfortable.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“We cannot blame ourselves for the wars our parents start. Sometimes the very best thing we can do is walk away.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“No good sittin' worryin' abou' it," he said. "What's comin' will come, an' we'll meet it when it does.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“my god
is not waiting inside a church
or sitting above the temple's steps
my god
is the refugee's breath as she's running
is living in the starving child's belly
is the heartbeat of the protest
my god
does not rest between pages
written by holy men
my god
lives between the sweaty thighs
of women's bodies sold for money
was last seen washing the homeless man's feet
my god
is not as unreachable as
they'd like you to think
my god is beating inside us infinitely”
― Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers