Kathryn Harrison > Quotes

“We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“Scars are stories, history written on the body”
― Kathryn Harrison

“My days are as long as despair can make them.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“There must be many of us whose lives have been divided into a before and after, with an accident, a death, a crime, a crisis, some moment or year or relationship that came between and changed everything. I want to see how your life moved forward from that point of division.”
― Kathryn Harrison, While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family

“The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“We are, all of us, molded and remolded by those who have loved us, and though that love may pass, we remain none the less their work—a work that very likely they do not recognize, and which is never exactly what they intended. —François Mauriac, The Desert of Love”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“I don’t go to graduate school. Instead, I move to New York, the city where I naively imagine writers must go.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“Who’s normal? Normal is a mathematical concept. It has no bearing on human personality or relationships.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“And now you’ll never be able to have anyone else, because you won’t be able to keep our secret. You’ll tell whoever it is, and once he knows, he’ll leave you.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“Prophecy, annunciation, virginity. A hidden sword, an angel bearing a crown of jewels. An army of knights, a cloud of butterflies, a phallic arrow that missed its mark. A tower cell, an evil bishop, a king’s betrayal. A heart that would not burn, a dove that flew from the flames that failed to dispatch that immortal heart.”
― Kathryn Harrison, Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured

“If complete enlightenment demands relinquishing the self, then complete enlightenment implies the acceptance of mortality. Not that there isn't more to being enlightened than accepting that our lives are brief and end when we did. But I do think it's a requirement.”
― Kathryn Harrison, Enchantments

“When we’re misunderstood and judged unfavorably, what good does it do to defend or explain ourselves?”
― Kathryn Harrison, Saint Therese of Lisieux

“Someday a sentence will come to me, a magic sentence that will undo all that is wrong and make everything right. But until that sentence comes, I say nothing.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“But as soon as she came here . . . she knew that she had lost what she wanted, that the life she had as a girl was the one she desired always, that she had no need of a prince, but only her dreams of a prince.”
― Kathryn Harrison, Poison: A Literary Thriller of Two Women's Fates in 17th Century Spain – From the Spanish Inquisition to Louis XIV's Court

“The road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us, so that we are out of time as well as out of place.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“The three of us spend much of our week together at art museums and botanic gardens and other tourist attractions. We are drawn to these places of silent staring and confused, enervated wandering because they make us seem and feel less like freaks as we stare in speechless shock at one another.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“We’re taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It’s they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“I nod. I don't speak. His eyes rob me of words, they seem to draw the air from my mouth so that I can barely breathe.”
― Kathryn Harrison

“Catharism placed no value on one sex over the other; not only did it attract women as converts, but it invited them into the clergy.”
― Kathryn Harrison, Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured

“The 1643 Martyrologie des chevaliers (Martyrology of knights)”
― Kathryn Harrison, Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured

“. I imagine myself stumbling, falling, a victim of my own gravity, of my desire for oblivion, for release from feeling. Because I feel too much—I always have—and it’s impossible to live with my heart always breaking, equally impossible to keep myself anesthetized. If I were to die in a fall from the breakwater, the last thing I’d smell would be the seaweed rotting on the beach. The last thing I’d see would be my mother’s face, like that of a clock: still, flat, and white, marked with the hour of my death.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The kiss

“When I’m writing the way I want, the way I love, which is without thinking about what I’m writing, a strange thing happens: I feel simultaneously the most myself I could possibly be, and at the same time totally relieved of self. I become, I guess, a version of myself that isn’t filtered through the detritus and clutter of experience. We can’t control so much of what happen to us in life. Even our own actions unfold in time in ways we can’t possibly imagine. But there is someone inside who remains untouched by all of that. That person may not really exist in the light, but she is there, waiting, in the dark.”
― Kathryn Harrison

“It's terrible to live believing that everything you do is of the utmost importance.”
― Kathryn Harrison, Enchantments

“That afternoon, I begin to learn the wisdom of keeping my feelings to myself, a lesson reinforced often during a childhood of female warfare and tricky, shifting alliances, so often that my genius for envasion at last approaches that of my mother. She may sleep with a mask, but by the time I am a teenager I have made one within myself, I have hidden my heart.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“I have to write. It’s not an option. When I write, I am literally building myself a place in which to live. Once I’m firmly established within the narrative I pop awake in the morning and it’s the first thing I think about. Not in an analytical way, as in “Oh, I haven’t really reached the crisis point and it’s already page 200—I’d better work on that.” It’s very much just running towards and into the place I most want to be.”
― Kathryn Harrison

“Nights, in my room, I turn the handle of my grandfather’s old-fashioned razor to release the blade from under its stainless steel cover. I trace the sharp edge over my arm, press it into places where a scratch might go unnoticed. It’s not so much a desire for punishment as for manageable pain, bleeding that can be stanched.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

“Guillaume Gruel, Richemont’s personal chronicler, recorded the dialogue from his employer’s perspective with an evident taste for the dashing. “Joan, it has been said that you wish to fight with me. I do not know if you are from God or not. If you are from God, I do not fear you because God knows my good will. If you are from the devil, I fear you even less.”
― Kathryn Harrison, Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured

“The eyes those silent tongues of love. —CERVANTES”
― Kathryn Harrison, Enchantments

“She will accept, acknowledge, see me only in as much as i will make myself the child who pleases her.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss: A Memoir