Kate Folk > Quotes

“As I belonged nowhere on the conventional spectrum of sexual orientation, I allowed people to assume I was heterosexual, and I suppose I was, as all planes are male in spirit, just as all boats are female, and helicopters possess the souls of mischievous children.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“Normally, I had no patience for people who griped about air travel. They failed to appreciate the privilege of being alive in the era of flight. How many humans, throughout history, would have paid a lifetime's salary for the chance to sail through the sky like a god?”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“Total freedom is overrated, especially when you get to a certain age. If you aren't tied down to anything. you're a loser, you're fucked. You drift out to sea.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“One time, in my early twenties, I’d perused message forums discussing objectum sexuality, but concluded I was nothing like the woman who married the Eiffel Tower, or another who was in love with a trombone. Planes were not static objects, but sentient beings with rich inner lives.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“Dancing and swimming - those are two things I'll never pass up. I figure when I'm old, I'll look back on my life and be glad that I enjoyed my body while I could.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“What man could propel himself to a speed of 150 knots before lifting us to an altitude of 37,000 feet? What man could carry me across continents and seas, all while keeping me warm and oxygenated inside his aluminum torso? No man I’d ever chanced to meet!”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“We've stayed put through worse storms,' Elise's mom said.

'It's not a tornado, Mom. It's a curtain of absence that negates everything it touches.'

'Might as well be negated in our own house, then.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“To be honest, I wasn't cut out to run a company. I'd rather collect a paycheck and let someone else deal with the headaches.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“Instead, the Last Woman on Earth had been handed a talk show, not because she deserved it, but simply because she was a woman. The Last Man on Earth dies with resentment in his heart.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“In the past I had approached dating with a typical fervor of an addict.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“The need for employment, for money and status, felt like an abstraction, a pointless flailing of his ego.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“You think if only you could find a partner whose desire manifests in a relatively noninvasive way. But of course it's a foolish hope. The more someone loves you, the more he'll want to meddle with the most vital parts of you, and vice versa.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“Reese struggled to individuate her descriptions of the three fucking-machines videos. She was running out of ways to describe a vagina as hungry. 'Her pussy is ravenous. Her pussy had a light lunch and now it's dinner time. Her pussy slavers for nourishment. Her pussy is about to faint from low blood sugar. Her pussy carries almonds in its purse to tide it over until the next meal.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“Such uncertainty was the nature of existence. We brought things into our lives, and time passed. Things exited our lives. That was about all that ever happened.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“My female friends have all coupled with men who are feeding off their organs and whose organs they are feeding off of, a symbiotic process that will continue until they break up or one of them dies. If and when they return to me, single again, they'll be diminished in body and spirit - feet swollen from renal failure, or eyes jaundiced, or breath coming short, a piece of their lung or liver or kidney on a shelf in some man's house.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“Only such a cosmic force could bring about my dream of marriage to a plane—what others vulgarly refer to as a “plane crash.” I believed this was my destiny: for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“My ideal relationship would be with a heart man who possesses a powerful, methodical brain, preferably an expert in some stem discipline. My dream is that we will marry and he will allow me to take his brain from him, year after year, a tiny bit at a time, through shock treatments and partial lobotomies, until he can't function on his own and I have to care for the drooling husk of his body until it expires. It is only for this that I'd surrender pieces of my literal heart.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“My career writing ad copy to exploit women's physical insecurities has rendered me expert in the minutiae of female beauty. In this sense, I am like a judge of pedigree dogs or horses. When I say that this woman is flawless, I do not mean it lightly. She possesses no attribute that I would, in good faith, suggest augmenting or reducing, highlighting or minimizing, smoothing or shaping or lengthening or rejuvenating or otherwise subjecting to any of the verbs I employed daily to describe the infinite ways in which a woman might fail to achieve her corporeal potential. I would not know how to sell her a thing.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“You imagine these objects will pop out in a parallel universe and prove useful to parallel versions of yourselves. You imagine your parallel self is like you, but better.”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“I'd met Claudette at Christmas and felt intimidated by the blank slate of her consciousness, and her proximity to the realm of nonexistence from which she had so recently emerged.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“I hadn’t actually agreed to go, but Karina’s will seemed impossible to resist. I accepted that this was the consequence of getting close to someone and calling her my best friend: she would want to do things with me.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“I rushed to the restroom, where I emptied my bladder, pressing my fists into my abdomen to squeeze out the last drops, so that I wouldn’t be tempted to use N108DQ’s lavatory, degrading us both.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“I’d hoped I was free of Dave, but on Wednesday night he texted me, asking how my week was going. His message gave me a slimy feeling, as though a tentacle of need were reaching through my phone and wrapping around my wrist.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“If I told Karina what I was doing, she’d try to talk me out of it, and rightly so. It was risky to take advantage of a boss-like figure while his judgment was addled by horse tranquilizer in order to indulge my obsession with planes.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“The possibility of true intimacy between us had foreclosed when she dismissed my revelation at the Cheesecake Factory. We’d since settled into a friendly but superficial relationship, like strangers chatting in the boarding group line.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“I journeyed home from the VBB feeling high. At last, I’d found a way to assert my desire to the universe, rather than waiting passively for my moment to arrive, as I’d done most of my life,”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“I savored these instances of human selfishness. Even if the new generation of blots had more flaws than the old ones”
― Kate Folk, Out There

“Isn’t that kind of wasteful? Not to mention expensive?” “All of life is wasteful.” “Don’t planes use a lot of fuel?” “The flights would run whether we took them or not,”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“I assumed that by contacting me, he was violating the contract he’d signed with Acuity. Karina must have asked him to reach out, on the off chance I’d reply to his message while ignoring hers. I didn’t want to talk to Dave, though I was glad he didn’t seem angry. He was back to his old self, sending me unsolicited pictures of meat.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy

“I was happy to be paid twenty dollars an hour to flatter a machine that would soon replace me.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy