Kathryn Davis > Quotes

“You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.”
― Kathryn Davis

“Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night--hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe?”
― Kathryn Davis

“In my lap I had my dear little pug, the smell of whose ears will always be sweeter to me than all the perfumes of Araby and the scent of heliotrope combined.”
― Kathryn Davis, Versailles

“This is because the Greeks had it backward, and no matter how hard humans try thinking otherwise, they still think like Greeks. For the Greeks, when you looked ahead all you saw was the past. It was like the past was the future.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“She tried to hear his heartbeat through the fabric of his tuxedo jacket, and the fact that she wasn't sure whether she could hear it made her think about how hard it was for any girl to ever know whether her love was being returned.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“Everybody thinks it’s going to be different for them, Janice said. The dinosaurs thought so too.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“The world had edges but you couldn’t see them going, only when you were trying to come back.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“A girl in a crown of stars was coming toward him, but before she could see who he was he slipped through his curtains of flesh.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“Everyone knew the meaning of a thing didn't emerge until there'd been an ending and you could finally see how all the parts worked together.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“Some people think what you’re supposed to do in life is fill yourself up with loads of things like names, the more the better. But that’s not how it works.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“Humans can't live without projects.”
― Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

“Insomnia is the wish to be immortal, granted by an ass.”
― Kathryn Davis, Hell

“It isn’t time that folds, it’s space.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“Water has more properties that are beneficial to human beings than any other substance. Also it can drown you.”
― Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

“Just because the world often seemed to reward ugliness was no excuse to give up on beauty.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“If you're a bee or an ant, you love sweetness. Sweet sweet sweet, the world says to you, I am sweet, and then, often as not, a human hand comes down like the shadow of the world and that is that.”
― Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

“If it wasn’t possible to reinvent the past in such a way as to make it conform to the present’s cheerful view of the way things ought to have been, why bother living?”
― Kathryn Davis

“Living among towers can tempt you into complacency.”
― Kathryn Davis, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

“Were we sexually intimate? What difference could it possibly make to you?”
― Kathryn Davis, Versailles

“The most important thing to remember is that a duplex’s properties are stretchable but they aren’t infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won’t even know where it went.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“As the sweet apple reddens on a high branch, high on the highest branch the apple pickers forgot -- no, not forgot: were unable to reach.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“Apes or human – we all made the same mistake, tempted by shifting leaves or the smell of sex, by music or a ripe banana.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“It's a miracle, really, that any of the royal children went on to become King. But maybe there's no version of childhood that could adequately prepare you for that particular future.”
― Kathryn Davis, Versailles

“Of course if a person looked at his life from above, he could see the whole thing for what it was; he'd only feel lost while he was living it, when he still hadn't figured out that it was in fact a maze and that both the way in and the way out led to the same enormous empty place surrounding it. (From The Thin Place)”
― Kathryn Davis

“The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees losing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could cause even a girl as unsentimental as Mary to feel like she’d just left something behind on the porch stoop she couldn’t bear to live without.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“There was a worm addicted to grape leaves, she continued, and suddenly it woke up. Call it a miracle, whatever, something woke it up and it wasn’t a worm anymore. It was the whole vineyard, and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, an ever-expanding joy that didn’t need to devour anything.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“You can always come back to a place, even if it isn't there anymore.”
― Kathryn Davis, Versailles

“She thought it was probably a good idea to like being looked at if you were a girl—it was probably key to survival. If you were a gorilla it was the other way around. Somewhere the girl had read that if you looked a gorilla in the eye it would strangle you.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“Think of them like gods, Janice said, because that’s what they are. The nape of a human neck is especially easy to see through – that’s why they love it when we bow our heads. It doesn’t have anything to do with praying. Prayers bore them.”
― Kathryn Davis, Duplex

“What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of art is not to make us laugh or cry, not to arouse our lust or rage, but to do what nature does — to set us dreaming," said Gustave Flaubert.”
― Kathryn Davis, Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir