Kat Howard Quotes & Sayings

This is the thing about fairy tales: You have to live through them, before you get to happily ever after. That ever after has to be earned, and not everyone makes it that far. — Kat Howard

It wasn't that I couldn't say it. I could. But there are times that you don't speak, because silence hurts less. There was no need to reopen old wounds when we both wanted them healed. — Kat Howard

There are stories where you must wear out your iron shoes to right a wrong, where children are baked into pies, where jealousy cuts off hands and cuts out hearts. We forget, because the stories end with those ritual words - happily ever after - all the darkness, all the pain, all the effort that comes before. People say they want a fairy tale life, but what they really want is the part that happens off the page, after the oven has been escaped, after the clock strikes midnight. They want the part that doesn't come with glass slippers still stained with a stepsister's blood, or a lover blinded by an angry mother's thorns. If you live through a fairy tale, you don't make it through unscathed or unchanged. Hands — Kat Howard

Perhaps the only happily ever after is to survive to tell the story — Kat Howard

Our pasts always haunt us. But sometimes the ghosts are friendly, and the memories they bring with them sweet as well as bitter. — Kat Howard

I'm convinced hell is actually an eternity of being a snowflake in Nutcracker. — Kat Howard

That doesn't mean that I would destroy those works, or that I'm not proud of having come out the other side. Our past art makes our present art as much as our past life makes us who we are now. In the end, if the art stands up, that's what matters. — Kat Howard

It's easier to see the places where things end. Endings are clear, endings are dramatic, endings are obvious events. A pair of panties, not yours, found, a slap of a hand across a face, a ring returned. Something that was, and isn't now.

Beginnings are hidden in the shadows of time, are gradual, are two half-glances in a dark bar. Tiny things that no one even notices, but that hold everything. — Kat Howard

I don't like the idea of signs and portents. People like to say fate is inescapable, but I believe there's always an escape. We make our own luck,and we do that by bending our will and energy toward what we want. I think that if you look for an omen, you'll find one, and it will tell you exactly what you desire it to, for good or ill. It would have been easy, had I wanted, to think of that tiny, shimmering smudge as some sort of sign, but I didn't need it to be. I didn't need signs. I had myself. — Kat Howard

This is what happens, when things are not quite a fairy tale.
You go into the woods to find your story. If you are brave, if you are fortunate, you walk out of them to find your life. — Kat Howard

Then, because glass slippers would have been a bitch to run in, I laced on a pair of boots, and went down to Ariel's room. — Kat Howard

Not having enough talent seemed almost worse than not having any, because having a little meant having just enough to know what you lacked — Kat Howard

The waxing moon seemed close enough to touch, if one were brave enough to risk the silver pinpricks of the stars that thorned around it. — Kat Howard

But there is another thing about midnight. It is when illusions break. When you can see the truth beneath them, if you are looking. There is always a crack in the illusion, a gap in the perfection, even if it is only visible with the ticking of a clock. Midnight is when you look, if there is a truth you need to see. If you are brave enough to bear what you witness. — Kat Howard

Practically raised by wolves, we had joked. The monster and the metaphor, and the way they match up that makes the double-edged word of wit. And then you realize what your words have done, and you weep because you're both bleeding. — Kat Howard