Cat Winters > Quotes

“Why can't a girl be smart without it being explained away as a rare supernatural phenomenon?”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“Don’t ever worry what the boys who don’t appreciate originality think of you. They’re fools.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“I love that books allow us to experience other lives without us ever having to change where we live or who we are.”
― Cat Winters, The Cure for Dreaming

“And all the while Stephen started at me as if I were something magical. Not the ugly way other people sometimes stare at me, like he was meeting someone in a foreign country who spoke his language when no one else could. That's how it's been between us ever since. We understand each other, even when we astound each other.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“I’d rather be able to dream and fail than to never feel the pull of another way of life.”
― Cat Winters, The Cure for Dreaming

“And do you know the oddest thing about murder and war and violence?'

'Oh, Mary Shelley, please stop talking about those types of things.'

'The oddest thing is that they all go against the lessons that grown-ups teach children. Don't hurt anyone. Solve your problems with language instead of fists. Share your things. Don't take something that belongs to someone else without asking. Use your manners. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Why do mothers and fathers bother spending so much time teaching children these lessons when grown-ups don't pay any attention to the words themselves?”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“Snobs are only fun in Jane Austen Novels.”
― Cat Winters, The Cure for Dreaming

“. . . his mouth tasted of the divine sweetness of icing on a cake when the sugar isn't overdone. The taste of love before any pain gets in the way.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“What type of world are we living in, if we're destroying books?”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“We live in a world so horrifying, it frightens even the dead”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“Come along. Let’s get out of here and go toast to youth and vampires and rebellion.”
― Cat Winters, The Cure for Dreaming

“We wouldn't even have wars, if adults followed the rules they learned as children. A four-year old would be able to see how foolish grown men are behaving if you explained the war in child's terms. A boy named Germany started causing problems all over the playground that included beating up a girl named Belgium on his way to hurt a kid named France. Then England tried to beat up Germany to help France and Belgium, and when that didn't work, they called over a kid named America, and people started pounding on him, too.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“The road ahead may be rather upsetting for a sixteen-year-old girl. I'm afraid your delicate female eyes and ears will experience some ugliness."

"Oh, you silly, naive men." I shook my weary head and genuinely pitied their ignorance. "You've clearly never been a sixteen-year-old girl in the fall of 1918.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“He said the only real monsters in this world are human beings.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“We live in a world so horrifying, it frightens even the dead.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“The flirty old moon eased his way across the warped and sooty floorboards and kissed my bare toes, turning my feet as luminous as the skin of cinema stars.”
― Cat Winters, Slasher Girls & Monster Boys

“Even if we never read a second volume of a book, the characters continue to live on and on and on, and their stories merge into other stories, told by new generations of heroes and heroines.”
― Cat Winters, Odd & True

“Just remember human beings have always managed to find the greatest strength within themselves during the darkest hours. When faced with the worst horrors the world has to offer, a person either cracks and succumbs to the ugliness, or they salvage the inner core of who they are and fight to right wrongs.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“I know the world seems terrifying right now and the future seems bleak. Just remember human beings have always managed to find the greatest strength within themselves during the darkest hours. When faced with the worst horrors the world has to offer, a person either cracks and succumbs to ugliness, or they salvage the inner core of who they are and fight to right wrongs.
Never Let hatred, fear, and ignorance get the best of you. Keep bettering yourself so you can make the world around you better, for nothing can improve without the brightest, bravest, kindest, and most imaginative individuals rising above the chaos.”
― Winters Cat

“I believe that 'love' and 'wrong' are two deeply unrelated words that should never be thrown into the same sentence together. Like 'dessert' and 'broccoli.”
― Cat Winters, The Steep & Thorny Way

“We were all survivors—every last one of us who limped our way out to the sidewalks that afternoon and spit in Death’s cold face.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“What does she look like?" he asked again, his voice taking on a tinny phonograph quality as his sister consumed my attention.
"A candle flame that can't decide if it has the strength to keep burning.”
― Cat Winters, The Cure for Dreaming

“But that’s the point. We wouldn’t even have wars if adults followed the rules they learned as children.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“Whenever I’m not writing, time trudges forward with the maddening, mortifying, miserable, morose, moribund pace of a funeral procession.”
― Cat Winters, The Raven's Tale

“Endings are beginnings in disguise, dear Tru. They signify one door closing and another one opening. They mark the point where the heroine transforms from a person who's been beaten and badgered and bolstered by life into someone who's about to shed her past and metamorphose into an entirely new creature.”
― Cat Winters, Odd & True

“Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H.G. Wells-style world - a horrific, fantastic society in which people's faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got transported out of the country to be blown to bits, and the government arrested citizens for speaking the wrong words. Such a place couldn't be real. And it couldn't be the United States of America, "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

But it was. I was on a train in my own country, in a year the devil designed. 1918.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“And do you know the oddest thing about murder and war and violence? The oddest thing is that they all go against the lessons that grown-ups teach children. Don't hurt anyone. Solve your problems with language instead of fists. Share your things. Don't take something that belongs to someone else without asking. Use your manners. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Why do mothers and fathers bother spending so much time teaching children these lessons when grown-ups don't pay any attention to the words themselves?”
― Cat Winters

“The head makes war, but the heart makes peace. And, thankfully, the heart ends up ruling more than not.”
― Cat Winters, The Uninvited

“What if the world never gets any better?'
'It’ll have a far better chance if you’re in it.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“Never let hatred, fear, and ignorance get the best of you. Keep bettering yourself so you can make the world around you better, for nothing can ever improve without the brightest, bravest, kindest, and most imaginative individuals rising above the chaos.”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds