Kate Murray > Kate's Quotes

“She has seen dieback across the West. Aspens are withering. Grazed on by everything with hooves, cut off from rejuvenating fire, whole groves are vanishing. Now she sees a forest, spreading across these mountains since before humans left Africa, giving way to second homes. She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Nothing can grow in the shade of secrets, she would say, love needs light and space to flourish.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What’s the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“No. I think you're highly intelligent. It's not lucky for you, in a lot of ways. If you were a little bit stupider you might have an easier life.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Beautiful people lived in a different world, had different relations with people. From the beginning they were raised for love.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me- nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“I am always half in life, half in a fantastical version of it in my head.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“She could get more information across with an eyebrow than other people could with a microphone.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“The unholy trinity of law, business, and medicine seemed the only faith in town.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement