Katie Y. > Katie's Quotes

“There's an easy method for finding someone when you hear them scream. First get a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. Then sketch out nine rows of fourteen squares each. Then throw the piece of paper away and find whoever is screaming so you can help them. It is no time to fiddle with paper.”
― Lemony Snicket, Who Could That Be at This Hour?

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.”
― Stephen Fry

“The sun's gone dim, and the moon's gone black. For I loved him, and he didn't love back.”
― Dorothy Parker

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Remember: if there is gum on the mantelpiece in the first chapter, it must go on something by the last chapter.”
― Howard Mittelmark, Sandra Newman

“To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Father's Suitcase: The Nobel Lecture

“When well executed, description is unobtrusive and lends substance to a novel. It is the body fat of prose: too much is unhealthy, but without any, you no longer have the thing—you have its skeleton.”
― Howard Mittelmark, How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide

“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”
― Lemony Snicket

“I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish [the book] and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place

...

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

And then the nightmares will begin.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.”
― The Nightvale Podcast

“You cannot have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.”
― Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Problems always start long before you really, really see them.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I just think some women aren't made to be mothers. And some women aren't made to be daughters.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Safer to be feared than loved.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes it is all too loud.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“They didn't understand it, but like so many unfortunate events in life, just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning