“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”
― This Is How You Lose the Time War
― This Is How You Lose the Time War
“I had the peculiar confidence of only children, the boldness that came from being doted on but alone often enough to be oblivious to my own strangeness.”
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“For octopi, ink is a defense mechanism, a means of escape. It is for me as well. Octopi surround themselves with clouds of ink in order to disappear before the clouds dissipate. Sometimes they also create hovering blots of ink that mimic their own shape, so predators will attack the ink and not them. Every time I write about my family, I instinctively obscure the truth with a cloud of self-protection, and invent versions of my life that give me a chance to evade the attacks I dread. The only way I know to get past the sense of threat is to go ahead and release the ink and then slowly wait for the cloud to clear. That might be revision. It might mean time. It might mean a lifetime of time.”
― Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions
― Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions
“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
― Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“Here I was, pondering the incongruity of being a mother and an academic, of devoting oneself to two projects, which is to say living a life, which is, I guess, no incongruity at all. Merely living, merely choosing, in each moment, who and what to which you will attend. The Latin, atendere, means to stretch.”
― The Upstairs House
― The Upstairs House
Cat’s 2025 Year in Books
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