Katherine Howe > Katherine's Quotes

“In this world, everyone is friends with everyone else. In a way.”
― Katherine Howe, The House of Velvet and Glass

“But remember. Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean it isn't real.”
― Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“Of course mothers and daughters with strong personalities might see the world from very different points of view.”
― Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“She was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls. To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees an shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full.”
― Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“...You can have this whole entire life, with all your opinions, your loves, your fears. Eventually those parts of you disappear. And then the people who could remember those parts of you disappear, and before long, all that's left is your name in some ledger. This...person -- she had a favorite food. She had friends and people she disliked. We don't even know how she died...I guess that's why I like preservation better than history. In preservation I feel like I can keep some of it from slipping away.”
― Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“I have no use for people who exhibit manners.”
― Amy Vanderbilt

“Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelist, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing. Burst of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the stricken survivors have their jest together, in which the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and make it all up again with the conventional fitness of things.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“The novelist might be greater possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Every memory we have changes slightly each time we think about it. We add stuff we learn in other places, or we forget stuff that doesn't seem important anymore. Or you think you remember something, like from your childhood, but actually you've just seen so many pictures of it, and your parents have told you about it, so you think you remember it, but you don't. A memory is a process. Instead of a thing. Like a story we tell ourselves that changes from the standpoint we're looking at it.”
― Katherine Howe, The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“Okay, he says. They both say it, all the time. I've finally started to figure out what it means. It means "yes" and "all right". It also means less than all right, and a begrudging no. It means everything, and nothing, all at once.”
― Katherine Howe, The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“A weird artifact of the past, aiming at the future. An intrusive, constructive contradiction.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“It could be that the best thing is something different from what you expect.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“Part of growing up is doing things you don’t want to do. When it’s in the best interest of someone you love.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“Shed locked it away, inside a drawer in her mind, and hidden the key.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“It’s like magic, the way god wipes the memories of pain from your head.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“Her fingertips stumbled over the key she’d found years ago. She liked having it. A fib for the chain. Or a talisman. A reminder that secrets can sometimes be discovered when one looks closely at ordinary things.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“Daffodils, first sign of spring. It’s how you know everything is about to change.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“A thin stream of smoke drifted skyward, speaking of mysteries within.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“The night felt both eternal and instantaneous.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“Most conjure doesn’t really deal with the weather. It’s about the house, or the body. Luck, and love. Money, obviously. And fixing enemies. It’s about power for the self, and influence over others. Charms get delivered by washes for the floor, or bath salts for the body. Candle work. Bible work. It’s small and personal.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“Once she started seeing them, she could never unsee them. They stalked her, shreds of magic clinging to the real world everywhere she turned.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“The only constant was change.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“It crumbled apart into ash, going from form to formlessness. To everything, it’s season. The pine cone grew into being, burned bright, and now it had disappeared. That was natural.”
― Katherine Howe, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

“Never admit to anything to anybody. Honesty is not the best policy.”
― Mary Astor