Katrina > Katrina's Quotes

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"

"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“And remember, the truth that once was spoken: To love another person is to see the face of God.”
― Herbert Kretzmer

“He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Right from the first, I could see a calmness in you - that sort of inner tranquility that they write about in books, but that almost no one seems to possess. I was wondering to myself: How does she do that? And I figured it could only come from having no regrets - from having made choices with .... such poise and purpose.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Slurring is the cursive of speech...”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane--in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath--she had probably put herself in unnecessary danger.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Anyone who has ridden the subway twice a day to earn their bread knows how it goes: When you board, you exhibit the same persona you use with your colleagues and acquaintances. You've carried it through the turnstile and past the sliding doors, so that your fellow passengers can tell who you are - cocky or cautious, amorous or indifferent, loaded or on the dole. But you find yourself a seat and the train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on. And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The super-ego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”
― Sylvia Plath

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

“Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Five years later, I take a deep, shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It’s not just that I can’t hold Aoife again, it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“If an atrocity isn't written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die. That's what I can't stand. If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, is written about, then at least it's made a tiny dent in the world's memory. Someone, somewhere, some time, has a chance of learning what happened. And, just maybe, acting on it. Or not. But at least it's there.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“It is all connected Dominick," she said. "Life is not a series of isolated ponds & puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on it's way to the future.”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“You are a steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer we could call you a scrupulous coroner.”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“PMSing-which I personally thought could be better identified as 'the one time of the month when women saw shit clearly.”
― Ernessa T. Carter, 32 Candles

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”
― Herman Melville

“Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Me thinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.”
― Herman Melville