Cate Kennedy > Quotes

“Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood.”
― Cate Kennedy, Dark Roots

“I watch people sometimes, wonder how they can walk around with the weight of what they know.”
― Cate Kennedy, Dark Roots

“You’ve got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist, then you’ll have to kill it in the morning with its eyes looking at you, wondering why you did it.”
― Cate Kennedy

“Why is silence so worthy of suspicion? You can choose to talk or choose to not talk.”
― Cate Kennedy

“I watch people sometimes, wonder how they can walk around with the weight of what they know. Wonder if they feel like me, stumbling with lead shoes on the bottom of the ocean, swimming in a sea of the unsayable. It's a mistake we make, thinking it's words that tell us everything. It's sound that breaks glasses, cracks windows, sends cats up trees. Bats hear more than humans, understand more noise, let alone dogs. Maybe we're just not getting it, standing here listening for sensible speech, dying of loneliness and waiting for whatever it is. How do we know we're not calling and calling all the time, our throats so tight with it, it's too high to hear? At night I hear dogs barking, and think how much of their howling is outside my conscious range, so that I feel it like a vibration but mistake it for silence?”
― Cate Kennedy, Dark Roots

“Rejection hadn’t occurred to him; the script was written and directed by testosterone.”
― Cate Kennedy, Dark Roots

“You know, I never wanted to live past seventy-five,' he says, 'till the day I turned seventy-four.”
― Cate Kennedy, Like a House on Fire

“What do you actually do in a cross-country run? ... I wonder too if there’s a back-up vehicle, some support staff who tail-gun the runners, just in case you fall into a puddle or a ditch and lie there overwhelmed with the pointlessness of it all”
― Cate Kennedy, Like a House on Fire

“Too many people just like me, who want to tramp in here with cameras, with backpacks, or with dirt bikes or mining licences, with cats and dogs and bulldozers and building permits, with a hankering for palm oil or rhino horn or rainforest timber, the seven billion of my own species. All of us with a terrible hunger. All of us with a ready narrative about why we deserve to get what we want.”
― Cate Kennedy