Karen > Karen's Quotes

“Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realised that you either became a power or you were crushed”
― Joe Strummer

“And so now I'd like to say - people can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks - I am one of them. But we've all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything - this is something that I'm beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. That's because they've been dehumanised. It's time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain't going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you're nothing. That's my spiel.”
― Joe Strummer

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Her hair was wild, her eyes were flashing, and her tattered underskirts floated around her. She looked like a glorious avenging goddess from some ancient erotic myth.”
― Gail Carriger, Etiquette & Espionage

“The whip was the standard punishment for disobedience. Running away was a transgression so large that the punishment enveloped every generous soul on her brief tour of freedom.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Saw your nicely strung-up slab of bacon.” “Don’t insult bacon,” said Sidheag.”
― Gail Carriger, Waistcoats & Weaponry

“Maybe if I’d been someone else I’d see it differently. But isn’t that the crux of the problem? Wouldn’t we all act differently if we were someone else?”
― Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

“It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.”
― Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary

“Ivy was particularly adept at being ignorant but could cause extensive havoc with the smallest scrap of information.”
― Gail Carriger

“The redhead whispered, “No, what’s a man like down there?” “Oh.” Sidheag wrinkled her nose. “Unimpressive. They have”—she gestured toward her own nether regions with one hand—“a sort of dangly sausage—lacks tailoring.” Sophronia blinked in surprise. That sounded worse than Sidheag’s description of a werewolf shift.”
― Gail Carriger, Curtsies & Conspiracies

“Mortals trotted about in shoes and corsets made to limit movement, fashion for prey.”
― Gail Carriger, Heartless

“The Earl of Woolsey was indeed completely nude. He did not seem particularly perturbed by this fact, but Miss Tarabotti felt the sudden need to close her eyes tight and think about asparagus or something equally mundane.”
― Gail Carriger, Soulless

“She had always had a need to live by inner signs and had been in perpetual waiting for them to break through. In their absence she had gone blindly on, abiding, making few human measurings.”
― Mary Costello

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“I should have thought,' said Fanny after a pause of recollection and exertion, 'that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man's not being approved, not being loved by someone of her sex, at least, let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“The government is to you what God is to agnostics – only to be invoked when your own well-being is at stake!”
― Amitav Ghosh

“Oh shame on you, who call yourself a Christian! Do you not see that it is the grossest idolatry to speak of the market as though it were the rival of God?”
― Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Well, you are a werewolf, Scottish, naked, and covered in blood, and I am still holding your hand.” He”
― Gail Carriger, Soulless

“That was part of being a girl--you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“The merchers are perfect marks,” said Kaz. “They’re rich and they’re smart. That makes them easy to dupe.”
“Why?” asked Wylan.
“Rich men want to believe they deserve every penny they’ve got, so they forget what they owe to chance. Smart men are always looking for loopholes. They want an opportunity to game the system.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“Humanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“There is a code of behavior, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“He was really, Lily Briscoe thought, in spite of his eyes, but then look at his nose, look at his hands, the most uncharming human being she had ever met. Then why did she mind what he said? Women can't write, women can't paint - what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it? Why did her whole being bow, like corn under a wind, and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and rather painful effort? She must make it once more. There's the sprig on the table-cloth; there's my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters - nothing else. Could she not hold fast to that, she asked herself, and not lose her temper, and not argue; and if she wanted revenge take it by laughing at him?”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Mi padre era un computador, mi madre era una máquina de escribir.
Yo era un cuaderno vacío y ahora soy un libro.”
― Alejandro Zambra, My Documents

“To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
― James Baldwin