Kay > Kay's Quotes

“I think to myself, It is terrifying to be visible, and then I think, I have been waiting all my life to be seen.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“As far as I was concerned, the sun could have melted the blue right off the sky. Then the sky could be as miserable as I was.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“In that moment, I wish my existence were as simple as being set on fire and exploding in the sky.”
― Adam Silvera, More Happy Than Not

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Oh, why does college have to happen to perfectly good people?”
― Rick Riordan, The Hidden Oracle

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

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“But why can't the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You're a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I'm wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. "Good for you, man" a man once said to me at a party, "you're making a killing with poetry. You're knockin' em dead.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message