Catherine > Catherine's Quotes

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives--or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it.
Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow?
Were the moments of beauty worth the year of pain?
And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says 'Always.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“it’s amazing what you can learn when you have the time.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps--perhaps--they are in reach.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“All that I am is a terribly brave small thing, with a terribly brave small life, and a terribly brave love that spans eons.”
― K. Ancrum, The Weight of the Stars

“Four light-years from the second largest pulsar, past the black dust and the white. In a small circle of golden light, made by a careful teenage star, I found you," Aexandria said seriously. "No matter what I did or said, there you stood. Like a fixed point, and the Earth moved around you.”
― K. Ancrum, The Weight of the Stars

“It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”
― Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

“Saying good-bye, perhaps to her father -- her favorite person in this world. this is how she would remember him. Not by the sad unknowing in his eyes, or the grim set of his jaw as he led her to church, but by the things he loved. By the way he showed her how to hold a stick of charcoal, coaxing shapes and shades with the weight of her hand. The songs and stories, the sights from the five summers she went with him to market, when Adeline was old enough to travel, not old enough to cause a stir. By the careful gift of a wooden ring, made for his first and only daughter when she was born -- the one she then offered to the dark.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“He always liked learning. Loved it, really. If he could have spent his whole life sitting in a lecture hall, taking notes, could have drifted from department to department, haunting different studies, soaking up language and history and art, maybe he would have felt full, happy.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“They are a sea of strangers, unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar clothes, with unfamiliar voices, calling unfamiliar words.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“There is a point when the night breaks.
When the darkness finally begins to weaken, and lose its hold over the sky. It's slow, so slow she doesn't notice until the light is already creeping in, until the moon and stars have vanished.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“She has seen maps of course, but ink and paper hold nothing to this. To the salt smell, the murmur of waves, the hypnotic draw of the tide. To the scope and scale of the sea, and the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the horizon, there is more.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“The world is wide, and he’s seen so little of it with his own eyes. He wants to travel, to take photos, listen to other people’s stories, maybe make some of his own. After all, life seems very long sometimes, but he knows it will go so fast, and he doesn’t want to miss a moment.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“She wanted to want it, to feel what the other girls felt.
But she didn't. And yet, Olivia is full of want. She wants a bed that does not creak. A room without Anabelles or matrons or ghouls. A window and a grassy view and air that does not taste of soot and a father who does not die and a mother who does not leave and a future beyond the walls of Merilance.”
― Victoria Schwab, Gallant

“Put the right words into the world, never know what you’ll catch.”
― V.E. Schwab, Gallant

“Amanda Hamilton poem. “Fading moon, follow My footsteps Through light unbroken By land shadows, And share my senses That feel the cool Shoulders of silence.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.
She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Where do they go, these dreams of mine? Do they live? Do they die? Do they fall? Do they fly?”
― F.K. Preston, The Artist, The Audience, and a Man Called Nothing

“They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“History is a thing designed in retrospect.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“It is the kind of day designed for wood fires, and mugs of tea, and well-loved books.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“When I Am Among the Trees"

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“It is just a storm, he tells himself, but he is tired of looking for shelter. It is just a storm, but there is always another waiting in its wake.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Time moves so fucking fast.

Blink, and you’re halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things, so you change your major half a dozen times before finally ending up in theology, and for a while it seems like the right path, but that’s really just a reflex to the pride on your parents’ faces, because they assume they’ve got a budding rabbi, but the truth is, you have no desire to practice, you see the holy texts as stories, sweeping epics, and the more you study, the less you believe in any of it.

Blink, and you’re twenty-four, and you travel through Europe, thinking—hoping—that the change will spark something in you, that a glimpse of the greater, grander world will bring your own into focus. And for a little while, it does. But there’s no job, no future, only an interlude, and when it’s over, your bank account is dry, and you’re not any closer to anything.

Blink, and you’re twenty-six, and you’re called into the dean’s office because he can tell that your heart’s not in it anymore, and he advises you to find another path, and he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.

Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Other people would call him sensitive, but it is more than that. The dial is broken, the volume turned all the way up. Moments of joy registered as brief, but ecstatic. Moments of pain stretched long and unbearably loud.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue