Tate > Tate's Quotes

“What are you grinning at?' Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle - too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape - and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal's shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.”
― Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories

“I'd never really found a place in the outside world, but had stayed away too long to fit in at home.”
― Chris Offutt, The Same River Twice: A Memoir

“Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream.
I'm not, she said.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

“I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

“As humans, after all, we become that which we seek. Dairy farming makes men steady and reliable and temperate; deer hunting makes men quiet and fast and sensitive; lobster fishing makes men suspicious and wily and ruthless.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Stern Men

“We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.”
― Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

“Innocence is a kind of insanity”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“You cannot love without intuition.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
― Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes

“To see you naked is to recall the Earth.”
― Federico García Lorca

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“The boy is loved. The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough to prevent this. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it?”
― Kelly Link, Get in Trouble: Stories

“The days that make us happy make us wise.”
― John Masefield

“Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.”
― John G Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.”
― Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux

“When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the west, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greenier and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm.”
― Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux

“How could men get fat by being bad and starve by being good? I thought and thought about my vision, and it made me very sad.”
― John G Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

“The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.”
― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

“My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.”
― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

“How far would you run with a piece of lead in your heart?”
― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life

“Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life

“Nothing is a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life