Katherina > Katherina's Quotes

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“We can possess all the fine goods that our civilisation has to offer us; we can have important jobs, and social status, and tone our bodies on all the latest machines – but without a sense of belonging to the world, we feel empty and our lives lack meaning.”
― Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”
― Heinrich Heine

“He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“We don't make reality. We evade it. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“People would rather believe than know.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”
― E.O. Wilson

“Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure.”
― Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

“Would I be happy if I discovered that I could go to heaven forever? And the answer is no. Consider this argument. Think about what is forever. And think about the fact that the human mind, the entire human being, is built to last a certain period of time. Our programmed hormonal systems, the way we learn, the way we settle upon beliefs, and the way we love are all temporary. Because we go through a life's cycle. Now, if we were to be plucked out at the age of 12 or 56 or whenever, and taken up and told, "Now you will continue your existence as you are. We're not going to blot out your memories. We're not going to diminish your desires." You will exist in a state of bliss - whatever that is - forever. [...] Now think, a trillion times a trillion years. Enough time for universes like this one to be born, explode, form countless star systems and planets, then fade away to entropy. You will sit there watching this happen millions and millions of times and that will be just the beginning of the eternity that you've been consigned to bliss in this existence.”
― E.O. Wilson

“Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don't expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“In Indonesia, bamboo is often planted over the site of felled trees to produce fabrics that can then be marketed as being “renewable” and environmentally friendly. Because rayon is made from cellulose, it is ripe for greenwashing, especially when consumers are fuzzy about how it’s made.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History

“We have assumed that ancient houses were built like those of today – as weatherproof boxes for living in and raising families. So we have been very anxious to work out where people ate, slept and prepared their meals. It’s all about what happened where – and we have discovered a great deal. But revealing where people slept or prepared their food makes little sense if we don’t also try to appreciate what it was that motivated them to get out of bed every morning.”
― Francis Pryor, Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans

“Let go of the past. Let go of the future. Let go of the present. Proceed to the opposite shore with a free mind, leaving behind all conditioned things.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh

“literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song. I have come across a line of argument in my reading, which posits that, due to the inherent fallibility of memory and the imperfect human vessels that held it, the Caoineadh cannot be considered a work of single authorship. Rather, the theory goes, it must be considered collage, or, perhaps, a folky reworking of older keens. This, to me --- in the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university --- feels like a male assertion pressed upon a female text. After all, the etymology of the word ‘text’ lies in the Latin verby ‘texere’: to weave, to fuse, to braid. The Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration, rather than suspicion of authorship.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
― Søren Kierkegaard