Kate > Kate's Quotes

“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Nothing I like to do pays well.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn’t as if you could afford to be.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
― William Shakespeare, Illustrated Shakespeare (RHUK) Editions: Hamlet

“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Don't say 'what,' say 'pardon,' darling, and do as your mother tells you.”
― Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary

“And doing anything for love in a city that deny it, is a rebellion.”
― Guy Gunaratne, In Our Mad and Furious City

“Boyfriends and literature: How can you make a life out of those two things? As it turns out, I did; more literature than boyfriends lately, but I guess you can't have everything.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“It's not love or anything, but I think I like you, too.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“А потом наступила Римская империя. Войны, кризисы, убийства и безнадежие — Август, Тиберий, Нерон, Христос и христианство, — город стал римской колонией. Теперь из его бухт отходили транспорты с зерном (став Великими, империи почему-то всегда начинают голодать), и навстречу им шли суда с бронзой, мрамором, статуями императоров, льняными и шелковыми тканями, порченой монетой, которую в ту пору таскали за собой мешками. Потом империя затрещала по всем швам — она ведь из Великой сделалась Всемирной, — кого-то убивали, что-то жгли, кому-то что-то доказывали и, конечно, ничего доказать не могли. А певцы и поэты творили, а императоры воевали, а юристы кодифицировали, а философы подводили подо все базу — город же прижался к земле и ждал, ждал, ждал, чем же все это кончится? Э! Да ничегошеньки он не ждал, он просто жил, как тысячу лет до этого, и все! Ловил и солил рыбу, сеял хлеб, давил вино, справлял свадьбы и ни о чем больше не думал.”
― Ю. Домбровский

“В первые годы, когда я еще их не знала, они бывали во французских литературных кругах, встречались с людьми своего поколения (сходившего во Франции на нет), с Ренье, с Бурже, с Франсом.
— Потом мы им всем надоели, — говорил Дмитрий Сергеевич, — и они нас перестали приглашать.
— Потому что ты так бестактно ругал большевиков, — говорила она своим капризным скрипучим голосом, — а им всегда так хотелось их любить.
— Да, я лез к ним со своими жалобами и пхохочествами (он картавил), а им хотелось совсем другого: они находили, что русская революция ужасно интересный опыт, в экзотической стране, и их не касается. И что, как сказал Ллойд Джордж, торговать можно и с каннибалами.”
― Нина Берберова, Italics are Mine

“I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.”
― Norman Mailer

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“That was part of being a girl--you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind

“the thing about books is, there are quite a number you don't have to read.”
― Donald Barthelme, The King

“Civilization is a race between disaster and education.”
― H.G. Wells

“Also – for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts – mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn't have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance’; a truly horrific experience is ‘well, not exactly what I would have chosen’; a sight of breathtaking beauty is ‘quite pretty’; an outstanding performance or achievement is ‘not bad’; an act of abominable cruelty is ‘not very friendly’, and an unforgivably stupid misjudgement is ‘not very clever’; the Antarctic is ‘rather cold’ and the Sahara ‘a bit too hot for my taste’; and any exceptionally delightful object, person or event, which in other cultures would warrant streams of superlatives, is pretty much covered by ‘nice’, or, if we wish to express more ardent approval, ‘very nice’.”
― Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour

“Every social situation is fraught with ambiguity, knee-deep in complication, hidden meanings, veiled power-struggles, passive-aggression and paranoid confusion.”
― Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour