Kate > Kate's Quotes

“I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.”
― Edward Gorey

“In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.”
― Edward Gorey

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Yet, even now, ever time (often) that I find that I don't understand something, then instinctively, I'm filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.”
― Italo Calvino

“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”
― Edward Gorey

“The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book.”
― Edward Gorey

“The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“It's bad enough wasting time without killing it.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life—I repeat, everything—is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.”
― Shakespeare; William, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Better sexy and racy
Than sexist and racist”
― Stephen Fry

“Life is too short and love is too long.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth