Kate Ellison > Quotes

“I wonder if that’s just how it feels to miss someone so bad – like being stabbed in the gut a little bit, each time you think of them.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town

“Maybe the things we think we have to believe are the things that end up killing us in the end, when we figure out we were wrong, about everything.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“Maybe there is something when it all ends. Maybe there is memory, memory of the person you loved, when you lived. Maybe this is the white-light-tunnel deal, and I'm pressing toward it, and it's pressing back, until we become the same thing.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“Dearest Penelope,
I am a giant jerk. I don't mean to imply that I am abnormally sized human who happens to also be a jerk, but, instead, that I am a normal-sized human who happens to sometimes be an extra-large jerk. When you buy me an ugly holiday sweater next Christmas, it needn't be an extra-large man's sweater, but it should probably feature some much-despised...figure that will serve to indicate to the world the immense degree of my jerkiness. What I'm really saying is...I've thought more about it, and I'd like to be of help to you in your quest so that come Christmas you can just find me a basic ugly holiday sweater that has no other object but to be a basic ugly holiday sweater, and I can wear it the next time we beat God and the devil alike at trash can bowling.
Yours,
Flynt”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“Think about a moment, a little centimeter of time you’d happily exist in forever, if time could be laid out along the spine of a ruler. Maybe it haunts you in that blue inch of half consciousness just before you’re fully awake.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town

“Lo- don't move," he says, seriously, his eyes like honey in the basement light- warm and amber and shining. "i'm still working."

"I had an itch."

"Let me know next time, and I'll scratch it for you. Before the terrible itching incident ruined everything, I was about to start on the dark shadow of your elbow crease. Now I'll have to re-create that perfect, dark, little cityscape from memory.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“After two weeks of feeling dead numb, I decided the sewage system needed the pills more than I did, so I flushed them all down the toilet.”
― Kate Ellison

“Six seconds in, six seconds out- no choice anymore. Don't mess this up. If I mess up, even by a second, I have to start the breath cycle all over again. That's the rule. The unbreakable rule.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“I should have added,' he continues, clearing his throat, 'that nothing the Prophet says makes any sense.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“My secret still sits, burning, in the bottom of my belly – that I love him. That I will always love him. And everything I want from him is now impossible: A normal life. A normal relationship. Wrapping my arms around him whenever I want to. Not having to worry at any moment he will evaporate.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town

“You're sleeping next to me right now. You're all wrapped up in blankets, and you look like a delicious lady-sandwich. I might eat you before you wake up. Just wanted to let you know.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“(…) maybe the heart is an organ on constant ready, always waiting to try again, always open to the next best thing.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town

“I banana the softest banana in the world; it's a new game, seeing just how soft I can banana while still banana-ing.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“Saturday is Flea Market Day, holiest of days.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“We are born alone, and all die alone, too. I read that somewhere, in some book. After Oren died I used to lie awake and think about that: think about the universe sucking up hope for us, soul by soul, until we're so dry we all starve, all at once, and the sky takes our bones and crushes them into mulch and starts over again. So goes the cycle. So go the millions and billions of things we can't ever begin to control.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“Believe you me, Lope-hey, has anyone ever called you 'Lope' before?”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“It’s not a real place, not a real thing. Mom made up the Gray Space, the place of anti-art, antifeeling, the cold dark place that felt like death. It was just her zany way of describing the place she went when she felt most depressed, when making music at all became impossible.
It isn’t real.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town

“So, if you were to divide your school in to subsections of the animal kingdom, or, let's just say into primates...”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“They all want to leave the Gray Space, Liv, she’d tell me. They don’t realise they’re dead until they remember what it sounds like to be alive.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town

“Pyscho,' Flynt says, pounding a fist hard into his chair. 'Ouch”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“And then- moving his long, clean fingers around my waist and pulling me closer to his pine, his clove, his grass, his snow, his light- he kisses me.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“I used to think this heroic: my sturdy, stable dad, capable of anything. But now I realize that he's just drawn to dying, helpless things. The unsaveables.
Like Mom.
Maybe, like me.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town

“Pam, my new therapist, who’s like some blissed-out, grown-up, yoga-hippie version of Rain, says that the physical body, the idea of the self, is kind of a scar: a brief puckering of time, a fleeting sewing together of energy and heart, which go beyond the physical form, on and on and on, forever.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town

“I expect to find Stern, secreted away in every molecule of air, and at every turn.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town

“Then again," he continues, turning to me as we approach the busted old birdbath- the point where Neverland ends and the rest of the world begins- "never say never.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“From the corner of my eye, the Ghost of Mother Past sits in her queenly bedroom chair in front of the mirror, glittering there in the evening light.”
― Kate Ellison, The Butterfly Clues

“For a second--a second that lasts infinite seconds--he turns his face away from the wind to meet my eye. He smiles, he smiles without worrying about the gap in his teeth, he smiles in a way that I know: he is free.”
― Kate Ellison, Notes from Ghost Town