Catie > Catie's Quotes

“It is still early as I get out of bed. The sun has not yet risen. I feel a sense of control that I sometimes get when I wake up before the rest of the world. I have the feeling that the day’s events are mine to determine, that I hold everything in the palm of my hand.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Good Bones"

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.”
― Maggie Smith

“It isn’t my job to make her feel better about she’s hurt me, and it isn’t my job to keep quiet so she can be comfortable.”
― Ray Stoeve, Between Perfect and Real

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“... a soft sigh letting go of everything I never wanted to hold in the first place.”
― Ray Stoeve, Between Perfect and Real

“When someone asks me 'Why are all men like that?' my answer is 'Why are the men you choose like that?'"- Carol Youngson (psychotherapist)”
― J.P. Delaney

“Instead of the perfect fit I’m used to, our embrace just feels like habit, and the sensation scares me... We’re not Dean and Zoe. We’re just two people standing [hugging] in a hallway”
― Ray Stoeve, Between Perfect and Real

“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending... Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve- line dictionary resume...Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.’ ”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, something real?’
And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the ceiling and the limp snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes movies in their mouths when they talked. but that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so deep inside this one , and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met. ”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Cobblestones and an El Torito. Thousand-year-old buildings and a McDonald’s in the distance. They were caught between the ancient mosque and the Starbucks, in a chaotic confusion of time”
― Margaret Stohl, Forever Red

“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“It's what I feel that I'm struggling to process. So many emotions, so overwhelming, that they almost cancel one another out, leaving me clear-headed by numb."- Jane, pg 241”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“... But she’s just not ready to talk about it. Can you give her that? Just some time to adjust.’
The last word makes my teeth clench. She’s adjusting. Always adjusting. As if she’s the sun and I’m just a planet, revolving around her. But I have my own path. (conversation between Dean and his dad about his mom's acceptance of him)”
― Ray Stoeve, Between Perfect and Real

“He [Montag] blinked once. And in that instant, saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in hours of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead.
The sound of its death came after.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Cram them [the people] full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The way she took on the whole world as if she expected to do nothing less, and to do it alone”
― Margaret Stohl, Forever Red

“Think.
You’re not just Ava Orlova.
You have your mother’s code and Natasha’s memories.
Alexei’s heart.
They’re fighting with you and for you. Find a way to make this work ”
― Margaret Stohl, Forever Red

“We live in a world where exceptional women have to sit around waiting for mediocre men.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“They can’t make us go away just
because they are done with us”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Luckily, I did not need to be pretty. My body was built to wage war.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“But she did not dial; she felt too listless and ill to want anything: a burden which closed off the future and any possibilities which it might have once contained.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“His face fell by degrees”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land