Kate Manning > Quotes

“—Shush sweet baby, I said, so tired, and mixed her gripe water with whiskey and dill weed, but it did no good, so I seen now why lullabies was all about cradles falling from trees, oh dear, when the wind blows, down will come baby, whoops too bad, but at least it’s quiet.”
― Kate Manning, My Notorious Life

“Because I couldn't trust anything, especially not myself. How could I be lying there next to him with these snakes of doubt worming around in my heart? It was not honest.”
― Kate Manning, Whitegirl

“My new tune, of spite and indifference, drowned out the truth: that I’d mistaken the burn of jealousy for love. The heart wants what it is most denied, a hard lesson.”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“Even now I cling to the idea that amour fou, curdled as it was, still had me in its grip. I want to believe this. If you do not act out of some form of love, then who are you in the world?”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“In this time, I learned for myself as my teacher predicted, how it is these two extremes - that we are transported by love and jailed by it - that are ever impossible for mothers to reconcile.”
― Kate Manning, My Notorious Life

“Lost love is still love, isn’t it.”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“I don’t want to get lost.”
“No, no, no, sweet, you won’t. If you get lost, I’ll find you.”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“The newspapers next day wrote that "with much hesitation the witness proceeded to recount the treatment she received from Madame DeBeausacq, the details of which are so extremely disgusting and filthy we forbear to give publicity to them." Let me say right now the papers was wrong on them details. The details are of Human Kindness. These judges, these police, these reporters, are squeamish low bloodworms, half of them, consorting with cancan girls. How I know this is because them girls come to me. So do their society mistresses. Also, their wives. I know them, daughters of Judges, sisters of Prosecutors. But these robes of the law did not wish to hear the filthy details of their own sex's duplicity, or dwell on the disgusting filthy things they did THEMSELVES, nor see the fair face of the ones they punish for their own masculine debauchery.”
― Kate Manning, My Notorious Life

“Freedom is our strength but comes with responsibility, went my thinking; it had to be tended and fed, or some such lofty idealism in a schoolgirl’s musing.”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“You could eat the air in the place, so thick with bread and warmth that it stang our cheeks.”
― Kate Manning, My Notorious Life

“Those who would learn must suffer.”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“Lust was a weed, a nightshade vine, a nettle, impossible to uproot as the mugwort I pulled in the fields of Illinois, so while in the daylight I was a flower of virtuous resolution, at night I was motherless in a cold kitchen, starved for the warm arms of a sweetheart and pretty words of approval.”
― Kate Manning, My Notorious Life

“I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. —Mary Harris “Mother” Jones”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“I pressed down warnings and hopes, so my lungs were tight, and learned then why desire is called a crush. To be crushed. I would die of it.”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“The crush of it. So this is it. Love swallowed by mistake or circumstance. Romance and the moon conspired to make a summer fool of me.”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“In this life, all we have is our savior and the honest word.”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain