Katie Williams > Quotes

“I want to only imagine things, not know them.”
― Katie Williams, The Space Between Trees

“People want to believe bad things, I tell myself, glaring around at my classroom. They want to believe the most shocking story. They see you as the worst version of yourself.”
― Katie Williams, Absent

“I let her clasp my hand and stare at me with her big, dark eyes. Because I know that when people comfort you, they're really just comforting themselves.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“We're quiet then, quiet enough that I can hear the books around me creaking in their shelves, rustling their pages, stretching their spines, as if they have something to add to the conversation. Which some of them probably do.”
― Katie Williams, Absent

“In this overcrowded, underwhelming world, any gesture, no matter how slight, expressing that one person recognizes another person is a nice thing indeed.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“Angela had been the first of us. She’d been found on a park bench by some dawn jogger or dog walker, her throat slit, her sandals lined up next to her bare feet. And did you ever notice how these are the people who are always discovering the bodies, these people whose lives are so orderly that they can rise early enough to find a whole other human being dumped on the ground?”
― Katie Williams, My Murder

“That’s the thing about having a baby: they are a part of you that is outside of you, so you can love them in the way you can’t stand to love yourself.”
― Katie Williams, My Murder

“a type of violence, that much charm continuously wielded, a blade that severed you from your own good sense.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“There is no origin for the word love. It is one of the first words and has always meant only itself.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“It was easy to make fun of Angela. And if it was unkind, which of course it was, it was also a way to ask without asking, Am I like her? No, you’re not like her. Okay, phew, you’re not like her, either. I don’t need to tell you how many women’s friendships are built upon this firm foundation.”
― Katie Williams, My Murder

“Or will she appear down below, a pale blinking girl in the dark lake of the parking lot?”
― Katie Williams, Absent

“But there is knowing something and then there is feeling it. For adults, these are two different things. For children, they are one.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“It was one of the unfair things of life--that your child had to look like your ex-husband.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“I feel it, that expansiveness specific to childhood, the breath filling you all the way up to the puff of your cheeks, the feeling that each breath is good.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“Prohibition! Everyone loves a flapper dress or a fake tommy gun, but who remembers the thousands of people who went blind drinking unregulated wood alcohol?”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“Unhappiness breeds unkindness,”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“Mystery is essential, they say. Mystery. Well, I was in one of those right now, and I couldn't say that I liked it very much.”
― Katie Williams, My Murder

“You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“Cruelest are the punishments we visit upon ourselves.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“What they don’t understand is that it condition is a symptom of me. That I am a stone buried deep in the ground, something that will never grow, no matter how good the dirt.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“Wes slid two more cigarettes out of the pack, offering one to me.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Why not? It gives you superpowers, you know.”

“What? Like cancer?” I said”
― Katie Williams, Absent

“She did not go so far as to tell the machine goodnight.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“Things just happen. And then they're happening.”
― Katie Williams, My Murder

“What they don’t understand is that my condition is a symptom of me. That I am a stone buried deep in the ground, something that will never grow, no matter how good the dirt.”
― Katie Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight

“These people whose lives are so orderly that they can rise early enough to find a whole other human body just dumped on the ground...”
― katie williams

“I'll say one more thing: I want to live.”
― Katie Williams, My Murder

“I felt like the echo instead of the sound.”
― Katie Williams, My Murder: A Novel

“The tears ran freely down his cheeks. "Is this what people feel like? Bad? Guilty? And when they do the right thing, the virtuous thing, is it only to keep themselves from feeling like this? Is that what good is? What it means to be good?”
― Katie Williams, My Murder: A Novel

“I don’t know about kind. It’s true.” He looked past me, out the window that wasn’t a window. “I understand how it is. You come up with your reasons after the fact, for why you did what you did, but it feels like you’re telling yourself a story. A story about yourself.”
― Katie Williams, My Murder

“I’m shaking my head rapidly, though I don’t tell her that this is the same thought that I’ve had a hundred times, only about myself, that I’m next, the next one, the next victim. I know that the Whisperers fear it, too. I don’t go outside at night anymore, not even into my backyard, one says in the tenor of a confession, and the others nod yes, yes. So maybe we’re all thinking it: I’m next. Maybe that’s part now, of being . . . what? Young? A girl?”
― Katie Williams, The Space Between Trees