Quotes from Kathryn Davis

Everyone knew the meaning of a thing didn't emerge until there'd been an ending and you could finally see how all the parts worked together.

It isn't time that folds, it's space.

Water has more properties that are beneficial to human beings than any other substance. Also it can drown you.

If you're a bee or an ant, you love sweetness. Sweet sweet sweet, the world says to you, I am sweet, and then, often as not, a human hand comes down like the shadow of the world and that is that.

Humans can't live without projects.

Insomnia is the wish to be immortal, granted by an ass.

Just because the world often seemed to reward ugliness was no excuse to give up on beauty.

As the sweet apple reddens on a high branch, high on the highest branch the apple pickers forgot -- no, not forgot: were unable to reach.

If it wasn't possible to reinvent the past in such a way as to make it conform to the present's cheerful view of the way things ought to have been, why bother living?

There was a worm addicted to grape leaves, she continued, and suddenly it woke up. Call it a miracle, whatever, something woke it up and it wasn't a worm anymore. It was the whole vineyard, and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, an ever-expanding joy that didn't need to devour anything.

The most important thing to remember is that a duplex's properties are stretchable but they aren't infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won't even know where it went.

Apes or human – we all made the same mistake, tempted by shifting leaves or the smell of sex, by music or a ripe banana.

The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees losing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could cause even a girl as unsentimental as Mary to feel like she'd just left something behind on the porch stoop she couldn't bear to live without.

Living among towers can tempt you into complacency.

Of course if a person looked at his life from above, he could see the whole thing for what it was; he'd only feel lost while he was living it, when he still hadn't figured out that it was in fact a maze and that both the way in and the way out led to the same enormous empty place surrounding it. (From The Thin Place)

Were we sexually intimate? What difference could it possibly make to you?

It's a miracle, really, that any of the royal children went on to become King. But maybe there's no version of childhood that could adequately prepare you for that particular future.

History is boring, Janice concurred, undaunted as usual. It's not like the Ride of the Valkyries. It's what comes before history that isn't boring.

It was a late afternoon in the month of October—the "Column of the Year" as the robots called it, the month's thick almost substantive yellow light holding the rest of the year aloft above darkness lapping at its feet.

The curly-haired girl stayed on the bench and looked out into the dark seething ocean of park just beyond the sweet yellow tide pool of the street lamp.