Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer > Quotes

“Is this what losing one’s mind sounded like? I hadn’t imagined madness would have a sound.”
― Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother

“I'd been told before by editors to pare back on violence. This always feels like a gendered suggestion to me - the parameters of what's allowed and what isn't from a female-identifying writer. I can't imagine anyone telling, say, Roberto Bolaño or Cormac McCarthy to ease off on the blood and gore. Women should write in pastel shades about love, domesticity. Leave the hardcore realism to the fellas. Well, fuck that. The fury is there; I had better write it than perform it.”
― Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother

“It's like I'm a wayward character in a story I suddenly refuse.”
― Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother

“It is true that if you start to scratch at the threads of any narrative, you discover it is just another enchantment. You discover there is no such thing as realism. All of it just made up. All of life, all of everything.”
― Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother

“I had not expected madness to be so contemplative.”
― Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother

“Is this not the essence of history? Gossip and fact and the imagination of the author intermingled.”
― Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother

“I guess in Boyt I am finding some sympathetic corollary - he is as tied to a system as I am. We all are. Fed lines. Hook and sinker. What a lie this life is. To be married. To go off to fight in a war. To be compliant to the dominant paradigm. There is such power in the neutralization of falling into a role set out for you by society.”
― Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother

“The thing has its hooks in me already. They say that everything you write, just like everything you dream, is a replica of you, or your unconscious self. They say you can't write a character who is not, in some true way, an aspect of yourself. If this is true, then all fiction is autobiography.”
― Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother

“Of course, I hate that kind of sentimentality. I picture the font it comes in and it nauseates me.”
― Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother