Katy Hays > Quotes

“But that was the hardest thing about death: the unrelenting march of time forward, away from the person you’ve lost.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“What if our whole life—how we live and die—has already been decided for us? Would you want to know, if a roll of the dice or a deal of the cards could tell you the outcome? Can life be that thin, that disturbing?”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“And I searched my memory -- that thin, imperfect archive -- for where might have seen it before.

[Ann Stilwell]”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“Wasn’t that, after all, why we had become academics and researchers in the first place? To discover art as a practice, not just as an artifact?”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“All we’re doing is weaving together a life. Trying to see where the different threads take us.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“I think I do believe that people can tell the future," I said quietly.
"But I don't know why anyone wants to know how their story ends," she replied.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“It struck me then that Rachel’s generosity—the thing I had been so taken with, the thing that seemed so genuine—was actually the source of her control. She was both benefactor and micromanager, skillfully moving us through our paces, and sheltering us with privilege while we complied. And while it was clear that she liked me, she also believed she was smarter, more capable.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“Life after parents is like a clean slate.

[Rachel Mondray]”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“I wanted to see the places he brought home in books from the Penrose Library—the campaniles of Italy, the windswept coastline of Morocco, the twinkling skyscrapers of Manhattan. Places I could only afford to travel to on the page.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“...time made it possible to revisit even the hardest places.

[Ann Stilwell]”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“We are, you see, both masters of our fate and at the mercy of the Moirai--the three Fates who weave our futures and cut them short. And while I still believe we can control the little things in life, those small decisions that add up to the everyday, I think, perhaps, the overall shape of our life is not ours to decide.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“I don’t know what will become of my life,” I said, “and I’m the one living it.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“But my father was like the putty that had filled in the sharp cracks between my mother and me, the places where we didn’t fit, and without that putty, we kept running up against each other, all hard angles and brittleness.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“I had never been to Europe, but I imagined it would look something like this: shady and cobbled and Gothic. The kind of place that reminded you how temporary the human body was, but how enduring stone.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“I reached out to put a hand on her arm, to offer her some comfort. I knew there was nothing to say. Words weren't made to fit these holes. But I knew what it was like to lose a parent. And after yesterday, to feel that cold.

[Ann Stilwell]”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“I do think people can tell the future,” I said quietly.
“But I don’t know why anyone wants to know how their story ends,” she replied.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“What if our whole life—how we live and die—has already been decided for us? Would you want to know, if a roll of the dice or a deal of the cards could tell you the outcome? Can life be that thin, that disturbing? What if we are all just Caesar? Waiting on our lucky throw, refusing to see what waits for us in the ides of March.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“I think it reflects the extent to which, although the Renaissance is often considered an era of logic and science, it was easily seduced by ancient practices that didn’t include geometry and anatomy, but rather a belief in oracles and mystical traditions. In some ways it was also very”—I paused—“ anti-science. Broad strokes, of course.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“Nothing, I knew, was as powerful as curiosity. I had always considered it more powerful than lust. After all, wasn't that why Adam bit into the apple? Because he was curious? Because he needed to know? For -research-.

[Ann Stilwell]”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“Choice is the one thing we all share. It's the ultimate level playing field.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“The death of my father had unmoored her. After he was gone, the tight structure of our daily life got looser: the milk expired and was not replaced, our small patch of lawn overgrew, my mother stopped changing her sheets. And then, there would be a day during which she would whip everything back to the way it was before, a sudden tightening. But the loosening would come back. A slow easing at first, and then a swift, remorseless undoing—again and again.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“I knew how impossible it was for people who hadn't experienced the loss of a loved one to understand how it remade your world in terrible, strange ways. That you couldn't judge someone for how they grieved was an understanding Rachel and I shared.

[Ann Stilwell]”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“Like a true cloister, it was silent save for the sound of our footsteps.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“You should be careful what you put your faith in, of course,” she continued. “Humans have a tendency to be easily romanced by the promise of knowledge.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“The academic world, I knew, was small; full of friends and enemies, lightly smoldering conflicts that had been stoked by years of offhand remarks about one’s work, and sometimes, one’s character. Just a survey of the room identified the different cabals: tenured faculty who still sat with their aging dissertation advisors from ten, twenty, thirty years ago, ringed by their own current graduate students who, no doubt, imagined how their own acolytes would someday gather around them. Each group was like a constellation, intertwined, but also circling each other, always trying to gauge the size of the other orbits, the power of individual gravitational pulls.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“overrun with blooming wildflowers, between which bees buzzed like drunken men, almost colliding into one another. The afternoon so warm and full of the gentle sounds of nature’s humming that I believed, for a moment, I was the poor relation in an Edith Wharton novel, ushered into luxury for the first time, already terrified of the day it might fade but desperate to experience it to the fullest while I could.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“Perhaps one needed a little magic to make a narrow childhood more bearable.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“The Cloisters, I knew, had been brought into being—like so many institutions—by John D. Rockefeller Jr. The robber baron’s son had transformed sixty-six isolated acres and a small collection of medieval art into a fully realized medieval monastery. Crumbling remnants of twelfth-century abbeys and priories had been imported throughout the 1930s from Europe and rebuilt under the watchful eye of architect Charles Collens. Buildings that had been left to the ravages of weather and wars were reassembled and polished to a new-world sheen—entire twelfth-century chapels restored, marble colonnades buffed to their original gloss.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“How was it possible to pass the time until you simply couldn’t avoid the truth any longer?”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“Alone, after all, was my default way of being, one of the main reasons that academia had appealed to me in the first place: the ability to be unchaperoned with captivating objects and ancient histories. This, I preferred to the idea of working in an office with small talk and endless meetings, the forced intimacy of team-building exercises. Academia did away with all that. And for that, I was grateful.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters