kat > kat's Quotes

“Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“But that wasn't what happened. What happened was they drove to Harry's and parked the Camaro next to an Audi and a Lexus and Gansey ordered flavors of gelato until the table wouldn't hold anymore and Ronan convinced the staff to turn the overhead speakers up and Blue laughed for the first time at something Gansey said and they were loud and triumphant and kings of Henrietta, because they'd found the ley line and because it was starting, it was starting.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“Soon it would be behind him. Soon this school year, too would be behind him. Soon they would find Glendower, soon they would all be kings. Soon, soon.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. Her eyes caught the melody and echoed it in radiance, then closed for a moment, as though to hide their secret. When they opened, the mist of a dream had passed across them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Didn’t someone say love is a shared delusion?”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The most impressive thing about him, to me, is his belief in those wings. Useless, fragile, attached to his arms by a couple of cuffs, and yet he believes in them as a child might believe a cloak will make him invisible.”
― Bethan Roberts, My Policeman

“The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“You hate yourself so much, you’ll hurt anybody who loves you. That’s it, isn’t it? Just to get even with them for loving you.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“Sometimes it took Alex and Hellie hours, sometimes days, but they always came back. There was too much world. There were too many choices, and those only seemed to lead to more choices. That was the business of living, and neither of them had ever acquired the skill.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“But he saw only dying light and a dead land. He uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew that the past was devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.”
― E.M. Forster

“Yet he was doing a fine thing — proving on how little a soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He hadn't a God, he hadn't a lover — the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease, because dignity demanded it. There was no one to watch him, nor did he watch himself, but struggles like his are the supreme achievements of humanity, and suppress any legends about Heaven.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“It was nothing to him that Nature had caught up this dropped stitch in order to continue her pattern. While he had love he had kept reason.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“And the third reason was that it suggested permanence. Blue had acquaintances at school, people she liked. But they weren’t forever. While she was friendly with a lot of them, there was no one that she wanted to commit to for a lifetime. And she knew this was her fault. She’d never been any good at having casual friends. For Blue, there was family — which had never been about blood relation at 300 Fox Way — and then there was everyone else. When the boys came to her house, they stopped being everyone else.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.”
― Mary Oliver, House of Light

“Of course! the path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. It’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.”
― Mary Oliver, House of Light

“No mourners. No funerals. Among them, it passed for 'good luck.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“She'd laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“You were my little bit of magic.”
― MsKingBean89, All the Young Dudes

“I've loved keeping your secret, Remus wanted to say, I'd keep a thousand more, for you.”
― MsKingBean89, All the Young Dudes

“after all that waiting they hadn't had very long at all in the end”
― MsKingBean89, All the Young Dudes

“Tell me a secret, a nice one.”
― MsKingBean89, All the Young Dudes

“Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art

Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art

Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,
that was style.
Or sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Jesus
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca.

I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.”
― Charles Bukowski

“...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“I said You don't know what worry is. I don't know what it is. I don't know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not . I don't know whether I can cry or not. I don't know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying