Kathryn Scott > Kathryn's Quotes

“A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.”
― Tennessee Williams, Stairs to the Roof

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”
― Tennessee Williams, Camino Real

“I don't want realism. I want magic!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Oh, you can't describe someone you're in love with!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“Everybody is nothing until you love them.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”
― Annie Dillard, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

“Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”
― Grace Paley

“Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
― Grace Paley

“I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.”
― Grace Paley

“The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.”
― Grace Paley

“You write from what you know but you write into what you don't know.”
― Grace Paley

“Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?”
― Grace Paley, Wayward Girls and Wicked Women

“Why do you want to be on The Real World?
-Because I want everyone to witness my youth

Why?
-Isn't it gorgeous?”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Thank you," he says.
"Thank who?"
"I don't know. You?"
"No, not me. Jesus."
"Thank you, Jesus?"
"Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it's just the opposite, more is more is more—more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake's long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it's of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L'Oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I've made.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Live or die, but don't poison everything.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”
― Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

“They keep track of time. Sometimes things happen and you feel that you need to mark them down.”
― Scott O'Connor, Untouchable

“Technically, all tattoos are temporary, even permanent ones.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out that it's not the truth and sometimes I don't know and never know, and sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don't believe he would repeat a lie so often. Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry at me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves her or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling.”
― Lydia Davis, Break It Down