Kate Hattemer Quotes & Sayings

Just when I thought I couldn't fall any further for her, I found a new level. It was like an amusement-park ride, when there's been a bunch of drops that you were expecting and then there's suddenly another one, unanticipated and fresh and sweet. You feel your insides questioning you: what are you doing, and why have you left us behind? That was how fast I fell. That was how deep this went. — Kate Hattemer

The times you don't have to think are when you get in your best thinking. — Kate Hattemer

I was sitting in a plastic desk-chair contraption in an English classroom in Minnesota, tapping out the meter of lines from Pound's Cantos, wearing a baseball shirt with a small hole in the armpit. But I was also roiling with feelings and thoughts and doubts and conjectures and worries and layers of complication ... If so much happened in my head, didn't I have to conclude that it was the same way with everyone else? I had to look down again. The world was too big. — Kate Hattemer

When you die I bet you want real life, pure real life, eulogies that are unpoetic and messy, smeared with tears and truisms, cliched as hell, the kind of stuff a person means. — Kate Hattemer

I hold a strict policy of automatic grudges against people everyone likes. — Kate Hattemer

If you wants lots of things, you can be happy when you get a few of them. — Kate Hattemer

Will our lives be dull or packed with adventure? — Kate Hattemer

Cat piss and porcupines! — Kate Hattemer

The future was always before you. That was kind of the point of the future. — Kate Hattemer

Sometimes, the most awesome and complicated thing you can do is just stick around — Kate Hattemer

Thank you, I thought fervently. Thank you, Slavic forebears, ye heavily into consonants. Ye fans of high-scoring Scrabble tiles. Ye who boldly dropped z's where no z's had been dropped before. I appreciate it. — Kate Hattemer

Everybody has unattainable crushes too and imaginary friends. Some part of their mind that they talk to when they can't deal with talking to real people. — Kate Hattemer

I wanted to call her a bitch. I almost did. But I couldn't get the word out. I started wondering whether that'd be sexist, and then I started thinking about how many thoughts could squeeze into the tiniest pause between words, and then I started thinking that now I was thinking about my thoughts, and also thinking about the fact that I was thinking about my thoughts, and how that could go on forever, as if my first thought had been placed between two mirrors and now there was an infinite, recursive series of thoughts. And then I thought about how everyone else probably thought about thoughts too, and how there were so many thoughts out there, an oppressive consciousness ladled over the globe like a thick, congealing sauce. — Kate Hattemer

I'd studied Latin for five years now, which meant that I could, on rare occasions, actually translate something. — Kate Hattemer

Everyone knows how to love, but not how to love well. The mistake is too easy. You call her a goddess and you think he's perfect and suddenly they're not people anymore. You've betrayed them. Instead of being in awe of their complexity, you've swept it away ... Once you've recognized a person as a person, you can start to love that person well. It's an awful thing to learn, but it's the best thing in the world to know. — Kate Hattemer