Cate > Cate's Quotes

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.”
― Dorothy Allison

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.”
― Dorothy Allison

“Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained.
And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.”
― Dorothy Allison, Trash

“It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth -- and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up -- that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“In love we often doubt what we most believe.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening... ”
― rainer maria rilke

“The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters”
― Albert Einstein

“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.”
― charles dickens

“Let's tell the truth to people. When people ask, 'How are you?' have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don't want to know about yours. But think of it this way: If people avoid you, you will have more time to meditate and do fine research on a cure for whatever truly afflicts you.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“My grandfather would have loved to have met you," he told her huskily. "He would have called you 'She Moves Trees Out of His Path.' "

She looked lost, but his da laughed. He'd known the old man, too.

"He called me 'He Who Must Run into Trees,'" Charles explained, and in a spirit of honesty, a need for his mate to know who he was, he continued, "or sometimes 'Running Eagle.' "

" 'Running Eagle'?" Anna puzzled it over, frowning at him. "What's wrong with that?"

"Too stupid to fly," murmured his father with a little smile.”
― Patricia Briggs, Hunting Ground

“[H]iding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn't make you nice, it just makes you a liar.”
― Jenny O'Connell, The Book of Luke