Katarina Bivald Quotes & Sayings

She had never been someone who believed you needed to have met in person to be friends - many of her most rewarding relationships had been with people who didn't even exist. — Katarina Bivald

You should avoid being drawn into things, and especially into other people's business. ... If you're tough, and ballsy, and well... not as wimpish and idiotic as everyone else... shouldn't you offer people support? Don't you have kind of a moral obligation? — Katarina Bivald

This is a small town, so everyone talks. Ironic, isn't it - so few people, so many opinions? — Katarina Bivald

Very few people had sense enough to appreciate silence. — Katarina Bivald

Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them. — Katarina Bivald

People were strange like that. They could be completely uninterested in you, but the moment you picked up a book, you were the one being rude. — Katarina Bivald

Books that had already been read were the best. — Katarina Bivald

What else was there beside books and work? — Katarina Bivald

As early as high school, she had realized that few people paid attention to you if you were hidden behind a book. — Katarina Bivald

That which didn't kill them made them stranger. — Katarina Bivald

Sara couldn't help but think that she had somehow missed the moment when life was meant to begin. For a long time she had simply drifted through it, reading. While everyone around her was teenaged, unhappy, and foolish, this hadn't been a problem. But then suddenly everyone had grown up around her, and she had done nothing but read. — Katarina Bivald

Isn't it funny... that you can be together with a man who is so wrong for you that afterward you've been cured of them.... You get them, you get cured, you move on. — Katarina Bivald

Amy might not have had the most exciting life over the past few years, up here in her room, but she must have been fighting death to the very end. Sara could understand why she had been in denial or so long. It must have been a frightening realization: so many books she would never get to pick up, so many stories that would happen without her, so many authors she would never get to discover.

That night, Sara sat in Amy's library for hours, thinking about how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, and grieving for her, the woman she had never met. — Katarina Bivald

I know there are those who doubt that racism is still such a big problem, but if you ask me, it's only middle-aged people who think that, those who think the world has automatically become better simply because they're old enough to shape it now, but without any of them having made the slightest contribution to improving it. — Katarina Bivald

One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turn out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it. — Katarina Bivald

...nowadays, everyone seemed to be dreaming of absolutely everything. Traveling and loving and having a fantastic career and a happy family, all while being thin, beautiful, popular, and in touch with their spiritual side. — Katarina Bivald

She always tried to be a fair person, so she made an effort not to judge him for it. But the fact remained that she was instinctively suspicious of a fit body. So often, they seemed to be entirely incompatible with other qualities--like intelligence or kindness or even basic politeness. — Katarina Bivald

For as long as she could remember, she had thought that autumn air went well with books, that the two both somehow belonged with blankets, comfortable armchairs, and big cups of coffee or tea. — Katarina Bivald

She had always hoped that Jane could have looked out over her surroundings and thought: 'I can create a better world than this', or 'You're much too unbearably boring, and perhaps I can't say anything about it without being impolite, but you are going to be absolutely wonderful in my next book. I need another ridiculous minister.' Still, Sara couldn't help but wonder what life must be like if you couldn't daydream about Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy (how had she decided on that name? One of literary history's most inexplicable mysteries), because you yourself had created him. — Katarina Bivald

We're too practical, I guess. You've got to be something of a dreamer to enjoy books — Katarina Bivald

how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, — Katarina Bivald

WARNING: UNHAPPY ENDING! she wrote. If more bookshop owners had taken the responsibility to hang warning signs, her life would have been much easier. Cigarette packets came with warnings, so why not tragic books? There was wording on bottles of beer warning against drinking and driving, but not a single word about the consequences of reading books without tissues to hand. — Katarina Bivald

Just look educated. How hard can it be? Off you go." It — Katarina Bivald

Never live your life according to the idiots' rules. Because they'll drag you down to their level, they'll win, and you'll have a damned awful time in the process. — Katarina Bivald

A complete waste of time - doubting yourself. If you make the slightest mistake, someone else is sure to let you know about it. — Katarina Bivald

You've got to be something of a dreamer to enjoy books, at least to begin with. — Katarina Bivald

If he had learned anything in life, it was that there were no happy endings. Life simply went on. — Katarina Bivald

She had kept well behind the safety barrier her entire life, but now she was standing there at the edge of the precipice for the very first time, fumbling blindly with the realization that there were other ways to live, at how intense and rich life could be. — Katarina Bivald

As long as she had books and money, nothing could be a catastrophe. — Katarina Bivald

People expected too much from forgiveness. — Katarina Bivald

The real crime of these lists isn't that they leave deserving books off them, but that they make people see fantastic literary adventures as obligations. You — Katarina Bivald

In books, people were charming and friendly, and life followed certain set patterns. If a person dreamed of doing something, then you could be almost certain that, by the end of the book, they would almost certainly be doing that very thing. And they would find someone to do it with. In the real world, you could be almost certain that person would end up doing absolutely anything other than what they had dreamed of. "They're — Katarina Bivald

There's always a person for every book. And a book for every person. — Katarina Bivald

She had thrown herself into one ambitious reading project after another, but things had rarely gone according to plan. It was boring to think of books as something you should read just because others had, and besides, she was much too easily distracted. There were far too many books out there to stick to any kind of theme. When — Katarina Bivald

Can you smell it? The scent of new books. Unread adventures. Friends you haven't met yet, hours of magical escapism awaiting you. — Katarina Bivald

It was funny, she thought, how often we stuck to the safe path in life, pulling on blinders and keeping our eyes to the ground, doing our best not to look at the fantastic view. Without seeing the heights we had reached, the opportunities actually awaiting us out there; without realizing we should just jump and fly, at least for a moment. — Katarina Bivald

Maybe that proves I was right about books and people: books are fantastic and probably come into their own in a cabin in the woods, but how fun is it to read a fantastic book if you can't tell others about it, talk about it, quote from it constantly? — Katarina Bivald

What the hell is life if it's not chores and working and making dinner, and then starting all over again? — Katarina Bivald

I've always thought that books have some kind of healing power and that they can, if nothing else, provide a distraction. — Katarina Bivald

It was just that she wondered when, exactly, she had become so old. Perhaps it had happened when her mother died. Some kind of generational shift. The mantel being passed. — Katarina Bivald

Maybe it's that the past exists purely inside me. ... I've never cared about growing old, but right now, I do, slightly. It's not just that you have so much less future, but you also lose so much of your past, one death at a time. — Katarina Bivald

You know, life would be so much simpler if it weren't for all the people. ... People are overrated. I'm sure I would be able to deal with things much better if it weren't for them. — Katarina Bivald