Kate Hattemer > Quotes

“I hold a strict policy of automatic grudges against people everyone likes.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“Sometimes, the most awesome and complicated thing you can do is just stick around”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“When you die I bet you want real life, pure real life, eulogies that are unpoetic and messy, smeared with tears and truisms, cliched as hell, the kind of stuff a person means.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“Everyone knows how to love, but not how to love well. The mistake is too easy. You call her a goddess and you think he's perfect and suddenly they're not people anymore. You've betrayed them. Instead of being in awe of their complexity, you've swept it away. ... Once you've recognized a person as a person, you can start to love that person well. It's an awful thing to learn, but it's the best thing in the world to know.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“Everybody has unattainable crushes too and imaginary friends. Some part of their mind that they talk to when they can't deal with talking to real people.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“I was sitting in a plastic desk-chair contraption in an English classroom in Minnesota, tapping out the meter of lines from Pound's Cantos, wearing a baseball shirt with a small hole in the armpit. But I was also roiling with feelings and thoughts and doubts and conjectures and worries and layers of complication...If so much happened in my head, didn't I have to conclude that it was the same way with everyone else? I had to look down again. The world was too big.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“The times you don’t have to think are when you get in your best thinking.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“I wanted to call her a bitch. I almost did. But I couldn't get the word out. I started wondering whether that'd be sexist, and then I started thinking about how many thoughts could squeeze into the tiniest pause between words, and then I started thinking that now I was thinking about my thoughts, and also thinking about the fact that I was thinking about my thoughts, and how that could go on forever, as if my first thought had been placed between two mirrors and now there was an infinite, recursive series of thoughts. And then I thought about how everyone else probably thought about thoughts too, and how there were so many thoughts out there, an oppressive consciousness ladled over the globe like a thick, congealing sauce.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“Will our lives be dull or packed with adventure?”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“Thank you, I thought fervently. Thank you, Slavic forebears, ye heavily into consonants. Ye fans of high-scoring Scrabble tiles. Ye who boldly dropped z's where no z's had been dropped before. I appreciate it.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“The future was always before you. That was kind of the point of the future.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Land of 10,000 Madonnas

“I'd studied Latin for five years now, which meant that I could, on rare occasions, actually translate something.”
― Kate Hattemer

“I keep saying there's no Choice, and what I've meant is that you can't choose: you have no right or ability to select one of the two alternatives. But I didn't go far enough. There's no Choice because the Choice itself is wrong. It's a false dilemma. The alternatives are not alternatives at all. Long versus short, quiet versus heroic: they're the same. In the scope of infinity, in a universe with no edge, human history is a flare and human consciousness is a blink. All lives are short and all lives are quiet.
But all lives are glorious too, Cal. To live! To live like a human! You are ordinary and extraordinary all at once. You have a heart that contracts and relaxes and beats out your moments. You are alive and you know you are alive. Your too-short time is long enough.
Long, short, humdrum, heroic: toss those considerations aside. Nothing to choose there. But we do have a choice. We do. Is consciousness a tragedy or a miracle? Does nothing matter, or does everything matter? That's the choice. That's the real choice.
And I've chosen. My cousin, my match, listen to me and tell them all. Tell Trevor and Ben and Matt and Lill. Tell my father. Tell the ten thousand Madonnas, each and every one.
I am Jesse, I have a choice, and I choose everything.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Land of 10,000 Madonnas

“Everyone knows how to love, but not how to love well. The mistake is too easy. You call her a goddess and you think he's perfect and suddenly they're not people anymore. You've betrayed them. Instead of being in awe of their complexity, you've swept it away.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“He didn't know that sometimes, the most awesome and complicated thing you can do is just stick around.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“Sometimes, the most awesome and complicated thing you can do is just stick around.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“Feeling is the independent variable, the x axis. What, in the end, determines it all.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid

“If you wants lots of things, you can be happy when you get a few of them.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“That never could have happened if he hadn’t been a guy. For one, girls aren’t allowed to wear onesies to school. They’re deemed immodest. Because, you know, distracting female bodies pose a huge educational barrier for the poor boys. And if a girl had done that zany dance, either it’d have been sexualized or it’d have been stupid, depending on the girl. “She’s hot,” people would say. Or “She’s weird.” That morning, leaving Town Meeting, everyone was jostling one another, still in high spirits. “Andy is so out there.” Voices dripping with admiration. “He’s such a…” They couldn’t even finish. No words. Shake head. Smile, smile, smile. What they meant, of course, was this: Andy Monroe is so, so freaking cool. Right after that dance—still in the onesie!—he tapped the mike and said, “Next announcement. The Service Club is hosting a winter-coat drive on behalf of the Coalition for the Homeless.” A girl wouldn’t be allowed to bridge both worlds, the silly and the sober. To be taken seriously, she’d have to act serious, and her seriousness would make her unelectable—just as a lack of seriousness would. It was a quintessential catch-22, and we couldn’t even call it out, because it sounded like an excuse. Well, I could be that cool, if I were a guy…. We couldn’t say it, but we felt it. We felt it as surely as we felt the weight of our bodies, because, like gravity, it was a truth about how it worked, this world we knew. Girls didn’t even consider running for Chawton School chairman because, as girls, we knew, we knew deep in our bones, that we would always lose.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid

“And when you die I bet that you want real life, pure real life, eulogies that are unpoetic and messy, smeared with tears and truisms, clichéd as hell, the kind of stuff a person means.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

“We're all crappy feminists," said Jiyoon "It's hard. That's the point. You have to think all the time. And then you realise you're doing something wrong and you have to change. Of course we're all crappy”
― Kate Hattemer, The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid

“Cat piss and porcupines!”
― Kate Hattemer

“The drama kids finally shut their traps, an occurrence to be savored.”
― Kate Hattemer

“I like dresses. They're the greatest hoax in history. You look all suave, and meanwhile you're literally wearing a bag with holes for your extremities.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid

“There no such thing as a tease," I said.
"Teases are a concept men invented to make people feel like they owe them sex. And you don't owe him anything. Even If he's up and ready to go. Still listening?"
"yeah"
" You can stop whenever you want. You don't have to be polite. Keep thinking about what you want. Every minute. And if that changes, change what you're doing”
― Kate Hattemer, The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid

“Just when I thought I couldn't fall any further for her, I found a new level. It was like an amusement-park ride, when there's been a bunch of drops that you were expecting and then there's suddenly another one, unanticipated and fresh and sweet. You feel your insides questioning you: what are you doing, and why have you left us behind? That was how fast I fell. That was how deep this went.”
― Kate Hattemer

“Nobody deserves anyone. That's why we all have to be grateful.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid

“He was trying to look nonchalant. Being a talented actor, he did look nonchalant.”
― Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy