Katelyn > Katelyn's Quotes

“I did not come into existence when he harmed me. She found her voice! I had a voice, he stripped it, left me groping around blind for a bit, but I always had it. I just used it like I never had to use it before. I do not owe him my success, becoming, he did not create me. The only credit Brock can take is for assaulting me, and he could never even admit to that.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“The judge had given Brock something that would never be extended to me: empathy. My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir

“We force her to think hard about what this will mean for his life, even though he never considered what his actions would do to her.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“I encourage you to sit in that garden, but when you do, close your eyes and I'll tell you about the real garden, the sacred place. Ninety feet away from where you sit there is a spot, where Brock's knees hit the dirt, where the Swedes tackled him to the ground, yelling 'What the fuck are you doing? Do you think this is okay?'. Put their words on a plaque. Mark that spot, because in my mind I've erected a monument. The place to be remembered is not where I was assaulted, but where he fell, where I was saved, where two men declared stop, no more, not here, not now, not ever.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“Nice is the enemy of interesting.”
― Miranda Cowley Heller, The Paper Palace

“Ever since I was old enough to question my own instincts, my mother has given me the same piece of advice: “Flip a coin, Eleanor. If the answer you get disappoints you, do the opposite.” We already know the right answer, even when we don’t—or we think we don’t. But what if it’s a trick coin? What if both sides are the same? If both are right, then both are wrong.”
― Miranda Cowley Heller, The Paper Palace

“I wonder if he would love me if he could see inside my head, the pettiness, the dirty linen of my thoughts, the terrible things that I have done.”
― Miranda Cowley Heller, The Paper Palace

“High above the tallest dune, a star appears in the sky, faint at first, then gaining strength until it becomes a brilliant jewel. And yet I know it is death I am seeing. The flickering out. The silent gasp. The sputtering beauty. A desperate flame—massive, transcendent—fighting for its last breath.”
― Miranda Cowley Heller, The Paper Palace

“He would never know. But I would. Knowledge can be power, but it can also be poison.”
― Miranda Cowley Heller, The Paper Palace

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Maybe [the ocean and I] were on the same side, comprised of the same things, water mostly, also mystery. The ocean swallowed things up--boats, people--but it didn't look outside itself for fulfillment. It could take whatever skimmed its surface or it could leave it. In its depths already lived a whole world of who-knows-what. It was self-sustaining. I should be like that. It made me wonder what was inside of me.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I made myself wrong for needing someone, for revealing that need. I needed more than the universe could give me. Clearly my feelings were too big for the universe to hold, too disgusting. I would not put them out there like that again. I didn't even want to have to feel them myself.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Was it ever real? The way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even just for a moment. Maybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high - no longer be a drug - and that was why you grew tired of them.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“It’s not about my gods or your Auntie Lois’s God being the right one. There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Cora knows that the face of fear is not an abstract what-if. Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“she isn’t above taking hush money, not in this economy.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Cora wonders at what point a person stops being one singular person and becomes a collection of parts.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Delilah never seemed the vengeful type. She drifted around life like she was riding a pool float, bumping into obstacles that gently nudged her to a new path but never overturned her into the water.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch