Cat > Cat's Quotes

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic. ”
― Spike Milligan

“It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“It was once said, and very rightly, that a man who is well brought-up may read anything. The only people who boggle at what is perfectly natural are those who are the worst swine and the finest experts in filth. In their utterly contemptible pseudo-morality they ignore the contents and madly attack individual words.”
― Jaroslav Hašek

“It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“I want for my words to be
touched gently,
as if you had never seen my sort of dialect before,
as if you never wanted to read anyone else
again.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.”
― Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires

“There was a girl who used to hide behind the moon with her legs bent against it like tiny fishhooks, as if she were the only thing keeping all that grey from tilting on it’s orbit and grazing against the skin of the Earth. The stars left tiny burn marks on her skin that sizzled when she touched them so that she sounded like raindrops in summer when she walked. The stars fell on her back so often it wore away in the shape of a fin. She bathed in the white moonlight and it made her skin more pale so her eyes looked wider. Her eyes were so wide that she could take much more in as she watched earth like the clouds over it were stage curtains being drawn back. Ta-da-do-rah! And then at the end the people cried and their tears fell from the earth and into the craters making pools for her fishhook legs to catch their stories in. One letter at a time falling away into the velvet black backdrop curtain before she could hold them. And the people sighed, mouths all open wide, people always cry at endings.”
― Kelsey Ipsen, The Dust Book