Katie > Katie's Quotes

“But I have seen the best of you and the worst of you, and I choose both. I want to share every single one of your sunshines and save them for later. I will tuck them into my pockets so I can give them back to you when the rain falls hard. Friend, I want to be the mirror that reminds you to love yourself. I want to be the air in your lungs that reminds you to breath. When the walls come down, when the thunder rumbles, when nobody else is home, hold my hand, and I promise I won’t let go.”
― Sarah Kay

“People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel -- before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement

“Not only had my brother disappeared, but--and bear with me here--a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.”
― John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back

“I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be one of so many, to have not just parents and siblings but cousins and aunts and uncles, an entire tribe to claim as your own. Maybe you would feel lost in the crowd. Or sheltered by it. Whatever the case, one things was for sure: like it or not, you'd never be alone.”
― Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key

“I've been the oldest child since before you were born”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“I would do anything for you. Anything."

With that, he pushed his way out...and as the door eased shut, she realized that I love you could indeed be said without actually uttering the phrase.

Actions did mean more than words.”
― J.R. Ward, Lover Unleashed

“It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play with rules I would never fully understand. And perhaps that was key: they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison. To watch them together was to know strongly, painfully, all that I'd been missing.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“But being a brother or a sister (if you are lucky enough) is the role of a lifetime.”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Appleblossom the Possum

“The love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn’t twinship, and it wasn’t romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative,”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree....Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: "I exist very nicely between the words 'action' and 'cut.'"
And even a third way: "It doesn't present as pain," I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.
Wrong, I want to say.
In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.
In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.
One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights