Kathryn > Kathryn's Quotes

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Why do people want to talk to each other? I mean, what are the things people always want to find out about other people?”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier - and that's a fact.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“Traits don't change, states of mind do.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“It’s just that I’m the kind of person," Rebecca continued, "that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“Don't be scared of your hunger. If you're scared of your hunger, you'll just be one more ninny like everyone else.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that's what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“No one in this world comes from nothing.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“I suspect I said nothing because I was doing what I have done most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don't know they have embarrassed themselves. I do this, I think, because it could be me a great deal of the time.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“I took myself—secretly, secretly—very seriously! I knew I was a writer. I didn’t know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.)”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Everyone has their own path. The choices they've made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we'll go and the people we'll meet would be pointless.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“In the absence of facts.... we tell ourselves stories.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall