Katie > Katie's Quotes

“I was on a quest to help myself. I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this particular profession because we are damaged - we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I live in hope it is her, I live in fear it is her, it is never her.”
― K. Patrick, Mrs. S

“Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
― C.G. Jung

“We had the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Everything you do in life will be insignificant, but it's very important that you do it.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
― Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

“I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.”
― Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

“It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens' beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience—and death.”
― Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

“The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of life might I have lived?”
― Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

“Sometimes August thinks Jane looks like a watercolor painting, fluid and lovely, darker in places, bleeding through the page. Right now, the warm shadows of her eyes look like a heavy downstroke. The jut of her chin is a careful flick of the wrist.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The breeze, crossing the rim of the bucket, whispers sometimes as we walk along. Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don't when they are happy — but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.”
― Claire Keegan, Foster

“Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men

“I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“My brother and I ran through the fields, the high grass scratching our legs and feet, the sun beating down on us. This freedom was all we had ever known. Brooklyn was a place my father had come from. A hole closing up beneath him. We only knew SweetGrove and the words that ended every fairy tale our mother read to us. We lived in our own happily ever after.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“In Tennessee, honeysuckle vines bloomed thick and full in our yard every summer. My brother and I ran out in the early hours, barefooted and still in pajamas to suck the sweetness from the bright flowers. It was never enough. That faint hint of honeysuckle on the tongue an almost broken promise of something better hidden somewhere deeper.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“When we had finally become friends, when the four of us trusted each other enough to let the world surrounding us into our words, we whispered secrets, pressed side by side by side or sitting cross-legged in our newly tight circle. We opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“This is how I spend my time. A eight o'clock, dark or light, I get up. I have my two cups of tea. Fair weather or foul, I open my window and take the air. Then I shut myself up and read...Those writers who can charm away our boredom, who ravish us from ourselves, whom nature has endowed with a magic wand which no sooner touches us than we forget our troubles and the light enters the dark places of the soul and we are reconciled to living - they are the only true benefactors of humanity.”
― Denis Diderot, Lettres à Sophie Volland

“A centuries-old song from back when Isora and me weren't friends yet, even though it was our destiny, because if there was one thing I knew it was that me and Isora were made the way things that are born to live and die together are made...”
― Andrea Abreu López, Dogs of Summer: A Novel

“And night arrives in one gigantic step. / It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little. These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people: // They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold. / In a month we'll wonder what plates and forks are for. / I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all. / We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off, / Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water. / We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up. / I see us floating there yet, inseparable—two cork dolls. / What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut? / The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock, / And from our opposite continents we wave and call. / Everything has happened.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty