Kathryn Davis Quotes

Some people think what you're supposed to do in life is fill yourself up with loads of things like names, the more the better. But that's not how it works.

If it wasn't possible to reinvent the past in such a way as to make it conform to the present's cheerful view of the way things ought to have been, why bother living?

Were we sexually intimate? What difference could it possibly make to you?

Humans can't live without projects.

I've heard the band is supposed to be out of this world, Miss Vicks was saying.

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night
hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe?

History is boring, Janice concurred, undaunted as usual. It's not like the Ride of the Valkyries. It's what comes before history that isn't boring.

Apes or human – we all made the same mistake, tempted by shifting leaves or the smell of sex, by music or a ripe banana.

It isn't time that folds, it's space.

She used to think there would be a greater sense of forward movement in her life, but now it seemed like where a person ended up was going to turn out to have everything to do with where she started.

It was cool, his finger, being made of titanium, and he used it to stroke her, first on the outside, running it over her pubic hair until she began to moan, and then sliding it inside her.

You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.

The Yellow Bear made its first appearance bobbing around on the swollen waters after the Great Flood, following which it disappeared for a while. It tended to show up in periods of unusual stress or upheaval. Even though it looked like it had been made in a factory by unskilled labourers, it had been forged in the Cradle of Civilisation and was said to be the product of a collaboration between humans and machines, lending some credence to the belief that machines had been on the planet long before humans were capable of making them.

The world had edges but you couldn't see them going, only when you were trying to come back.

Just because the world often seemed to reward ugliness was no excuse to give up on beauty.

Everyone knew the meaning of a thing didn't emerge until there'd been an ending and you could finally see how all the parts worked together.

The most important thing to remember is that a duplex's properties are stretchable but they aren't infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won't even know where it went.

There was a worm addicted to grape leaves, she continued, and suddenly it woke up. Call it a miracle, whatever, something woke it up and it wasn't a worm anymore. It was the whole vineyard, and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, an ever-expanding joy that didn't need to devour anything.

A girl in a crown of stars was coming toward him, but before she could see who he was he slipped through his curtains of flesh.

Everybody thinks it's going to be different for them, Janice said. The dinosaurs thought so too.

Of course if a person looked at his life from above, he could see the whole thing for what it was; he'd only feel lost while he was living it, when he still hadn't figured out that it was in fact a maze and that both the way in and the way out led to the same enormous empty place surrounding it. (From The Thin Place)

This is because the Greeks had it backward, and no matter how hard humans try thinking otherwise, they still think like Greeks. For the Greeks, when you looked ahead all you saw was the past. It was like the past was the future.

The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees losing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could cause even a girl as unsentimental as Mary to feel like she'd just left something behind on the porch stoop she couldn't bear to live without.

As the sweet apple reddens on a high branch, high on the highest branch the apple pickers forgot
no, not forgot: were unable to reach.

It's a miracle, really, that any of the royal children went on to become King. But maybe there's no version of childhood that could adequately prepare you for that particular future.

She tried to hear his heartbeat through the fabric of his tuxedo jacket, and the fact that she wasn't sure whether she could hear it made her think about how hard it was for any girl to ever know whether her love was being returned.