Katie > Katie's Quotes

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“It is always safe to see yourself truthfully. You never have to be ashamed of yourself, with yourself.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“The more a daughter knows the details of her mother's life [...] the stronger the daughter.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. Of all life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“Just as there is no warning for childbirth, there is no preparation for the sight of a first child... There should be a song for women to sing at this moment, or a prayer to recite. But perhaps there is none because there are no words strong enough to name the moment.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“We called them the Nine-to-Fivers. They lived in accordance with nature, waking and sleeping with the cycle of the sun. Mealtimes, business hours, the world conformed to their schedule. The best markets, the A-list concerts, the street fairs, the banner festivities were on Saturdays and Sundays. They sold out movies, art openings, ceramics classes. They had evenings to waste. The watched the Super Bowl, they watched the Oscars, they made reservations for dinner because they ate dinner at a normal time. They brunched, ruthlessly, and read the Sunday Times on Sundays. They moved in crowds that reinforced their citizenship: crowded museums, crowded subways, crowded bars, the city teeming with extras for the movie they starred in.

They were dining, shopping, consuming, unwinding, expanding while we were working, diminishing, being absorbed into their scenery. That is why we -- the Industry People -- got so greedy when the Nine-to-Fivers went to bed.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“It is a strange pressure to be across from a man who wants something that you don't want to give. It's like standing in a forceful current, which at first you think is not too strong, but the longer you stand, the more tired you become, the harder it is to stay upright.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down. By fighting and taming the demons that laid them low and now reside in us.”
― Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

“First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It’s one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.”
― Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

“We are a nation of immigrants and no one knows who’s coming across our borders today, whose story might add a significant page to our American story. Here in the early years of our new century, as at the turn of the last, we are once again at war with our “new Americans.” As in the last, people will come, will suffer hardship and prejudice, will do battle with the most reactionary forces and hardest hearts of their adopted home and will prove resilient and victorious. I”
― Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

“Children bring with them grace, patience, transcendence, second chances, rebirth and a reawakening of the love that’s in your heart and present in your home. They are God giving you another shot. My”
― Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

“We honor our parents by not accepting as the final equation the most troubling characteristics of our relationship. I decided between my father and me that the sum of our troubles would not be the summation of our lives together. In analysis, you work to turn the ghosts that haunt you into ancestors who accompany you. That takes hard work and a lot of love, but it's the way we lessen the burdens our children have to carry.”
― Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

“If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“What goes unsaid is that women might be more ambitious and focused because we’ve never had a choice. We’ve had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we’ve also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“We don’t all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“It’s great to remember that reading is my first love.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“If readers discount certain topics as unworthy of their attention, if readers are going to judge a book by its cover or feel excluded from a certain kind of book because the cover is, say, pink, the failure is with the reader, not the writer. To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance,”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“There are books written by women. There are books written by men. Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special "women's fiction" designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience, which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, wedding themselves, immaculately conceiving children, and the like.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don't dare be so alive.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“I want characters to do the things I am afraid to do for fear of making myself more unlikable than I may already be. I want characters to be the most honest of all things - human.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“In a perfect world, pregnancy would be an intimate experience shared by a woman and her partner alone, but for various reasons that is not possible. Pregnancy is an experience that invites public intervention and forces the female body into the public discourse. In many ways, pregnancy is the least private experience of a woman’s life.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Human endurance fascinates me, probably too much because more often than not, I think of life in terms of enduring instead of living.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“The willingness to show up changes us, It makes us a little braver each time.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“The pregnant body suggests a story we think we know: health, love, happiness.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“It's not easy to dismantle the very things that help make you who you are. It's not easy to stay grateful for your own journey while you acknowledge that certain parts of it were incredibly unhealthy and shouldn't be perpetuated.”
― Jamie Wright