Kate > Kate's Quotes

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“End with an image and don't explain.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Do anything, but let it produce joy.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Blooming under a cold moon, we are like fireworks...
Rising, shining, and finally scattering and fading.
So until that moment comes when we vanish like fireworks...
Lets us sparkle brightly,
Always...”
― Tite Kubo

“If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.”
― Émile Zola

“What is more important - Pretending to live OR living your life? Forget about what others think about you and your way of living. Live your life the way you like it.”
― Manoj Arora, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom

“No one else has to live my life but me, and I'm gonna do it my way.”
― Maris Black, Initiation

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”
― Walt Whitman

“it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence—nature, the arts, human love.”
― May Sarton, The House by the Sea: A Journal

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
― May Sarton

“Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.”
― May Sarton

“For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.”
― May Sarton

“I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.”
― May Sarton

“Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.”
― May Sarton

“Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
― James Michener

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
― James A. Michener

“Recognizing that people's reactions don't belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you've created, terrific. If people ignore what you've created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you've created, don't sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you've created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest - as politely as you possibly can - that they go make their own fucking art. Then stubbornly continue making yours.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”
― Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”
― Paul Theroux