Katey Flowers > Recent Status Updates

Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at understanding tones and voices, even though it’s harder with people, because the lie and joke and hide their emotions and say shit they don’t mean. People don’t come naturally to me, and I’ve had to study and practice, like when you’re first learning to read and have to sound out the syllables. I have to learn people phonetically and the memorise them by rote.

“No one person is meant to love in the same way as another: we all invent it fresh, each time, for each person.”

“Fear is a fair exchange for love… Fear has wisdom in it, if you treat it well.”

“That is what fear can do. It is one of its darkest powers: it makes murky that which would otherwise be clear. It hides us from ourselves.”

“What do you do, in the face of evil men? In the face of evil men, protected by strong men and served by weak men?”

“The future isn’t something you have any right to, before it arrives.”

“I can’t. I’m just too tired.”
“You are not tired. You are panicked, and angry, and afraid, and lost. You will continue to be all of those things until you get up and do something. Then you will just be angry and afraid.”

“A gagana will not allow misery, because gaganas live long. They have seen too many beginnings to believe in anything so final as an ending.”

“To dare is to lose one’s balance, one’s footing in the world. Not to dare is to lose everything worth having.”

“You cannot both jump and not jump, Christopher,’ said Jacques. ‘You must choose.”

“When you read these words on a page , what happens to them, when they become you?”

“Stories never start at the beginning, Benny. They differ from life in that regard. Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning into an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.”

“Good taste is just an excuse for people with no imagination.”

“How terrible to have no imagination, Millie thought. To look at that magnificent house on the footpath and just see junk.”

“He hadn’t known words could be so powerful. Was it the words getting him up the mountain, or his own feet? Did the two know about each other?”

“Matthew appreciated the way Lewis could move from sadness to happiness. As if the feelings didn’t mind each other; as if they might be friends.”

“I wanted to tell her that
dead things still matter”

“I’ve come to know that
if you’re always looking up
you’ll miss stuff -
a whole other bustling world
right
beneath your feet.”

“It seems inappropriate for a young lady to be robbing a museum unchaperoned. The world is a dangerous place these days, you know.”

“When did caring become so unfashionable?”

“she wondered why men needed all that space when their answers to everything were always ‘no’.”

“That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.”

“History is a thing designed in retrospect.”

“He didn’t realize how much connective tissue was made up of guilt.”

“His heart is a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything.”

“A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.”

“They didn’t want to set the world on fire. They just wanted to be less alone in it.”

“And when you are weird, when your surroundings become quiet, you think maybe you aren’t quite so fucked up. You think, Why was it so hard before?”

“A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.”