Katie Yee > Quotes

“You're never too old to be afraid of what you can't see.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“Do you remember the moment you learned the truth about some colors? That purple is the marriage of red and blue. That orange is the place where yellow and red meet, and that green is blue and yellow gone dancing. The first colors to make you think about the blurring of boundaries, the end of one definable thing and the bursting forth of something totally new.”
― Katie Yee, Blue Story

“They say the intensity of your emotions dulls with age, but the complexity of emotions increases—more mixed feelings, things that are bittersweet.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“The sky will sometimes be there and sometimes not. When I’m lucky, like today, I’ll look up and even catch a sliver of the sunrise—some startling color that’s stuck around.”
― Katie Yee, Blue Story

“Even when he’s packing up his things or taking the kids someplace, even in the middle of this shit storm, there are little moments when I see the Sam I knew. When he says something funny or makes this pensive facial expression I have quietly adored or hums a song we used to dance to. He peeks through the spaces in between the dense forest that has grown between us, shoots through like dappled sunlight. In moments like these, it’s like nothing has happened. No Maggie. No kids even. The way that certain angles of sun and warmth can hit you exactly like they did in your youth; sun that has been untouched by time. Just like he said: he was the sky, and I was the soil, and the weather was his attempt to meet me. This is when the heartbreak hits me hardest. When he reminds me of the people we used to be, when we had so much in front of us. This is when I most want to let him in on things. He transforms back into someone I want to tell my life to. And then something shifts in the atmosphere, and the moment—that person—is gone.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“* The whole thing reminded me of the time my seventh grade social studies teacher made us read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” She asked us how we might describe things to people who had never seen the wider world before. “How do you explain the ocean?” she asked us, and someone brave said, “Blue.” And she took it one step further, “How do you explain blue,” she asked, “to someone with no point of reference for it?” No color lodged in their memory, no internal sky or sea to conjure up. 
Stemming from that class was the inexplicably visceral fear that not everyone saw the colors the same. Like, what if my mom’s green was my gray? What if, when I was young and malleable, she pointed to grass and called it green, and “green” was the name I gave to the color in front of me? 
The thought was a loneliness like nothing I had known before.”
― Katie Yee, Blue Story

“The way I see it: either I keep this little detail a secret or he feels guilty every day of the rest of our lives. One of us will have to bear some extra weight. Like if the bill at a restaurant is split down the middle, but it comes to an odd number. Someone will always be charged the additional cent.”
― Katie Yee, Blue Story

“Besides, I'm reluctant to pluck my own flesh and blood and place them there, in my stories. I don't want to spin them into something against their will.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“But I don’t even want to try; I like the surprise of it. I want to meet them new every day.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“we, each of us, have many soulmates. And that they come in so many forms: in husbands and wives, in best friends, in dogs”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“I was always the one holding the camera”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“I have on good authority (an OB nurse holding court at a friend’s holiday party) that when they are born”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“Darlene and I decide to marathon Gilmore Girls”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“The allegory of the cave”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“Mom. It becomes the call to which you must respond most often. And how odd it feels to suddenly go by a name you had used for someone else”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“There are some stories we grow into.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“It hurts in an unexpected way, like doing yoga for the first time in a long while and realizing you can’t bend the way you thought you could; a new soreness.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“Sometimes being a mother feels like a punishment out of myth. The tree that won’t accept its severance from the ground. The stone being rolled up the hill. (The stone stuck in my chest.)”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“She was the only one in the family who knew how to operate a camera, which means she took the photo herself. She liked the tangibility of memory.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“You’re never too old to be afraid of what you can’t see. How scary it is to be in the dark of things.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“There’s a video somewhere on the internet of a raccoon who has gotten his hands on a tuft of cotton candy. Off he goes to the river—he can’t believe his luck! He begins to wash it”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“Future Danny knelt down like he was fetching the food from the oven. He held something up to me in the shape of a ring—only there was a big black hole where the stone should’ve been.”
― Katie Yee, Blue Story

“They say the intensity of your emotions dulls with age”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“It's the kind of spring day that warns you that a hot summer is coming. It forces you to feel your body: the way your sweat runs down your hairline and your thighs stick to every seat. It's one of those days when you look at perfectly un-sweaty people wearing blue jeans and wonder where their glands are. You are painfully aware that you are thirsty and gross.”
― Katie Yee

“Having an awkward conversation with someone you don’t know all that well is an awful lot like having a child first acquiring language. You don’t know how to talk about what’s not in the room”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“Maybe every lover becomes an archivist of their beloved.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“Every room becomes a waiting room.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“I could ride shotgun with his body in the driver’s seat for the rest of my life. He the tinman, and I Dorothy-just a girl who wants to go home but doesn’t know how to get there anymore.”
― Katie Yee, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

“Not Dream Home?” I had asked, stupidly, when Danny coined the term first.
He shook his head. “Future Home.” He liked the certainty. He felt certain.”
― Katie Yee, Blue Story