Katherine Catmull Quotes

#1. She knew what it meant to want to return to safety and seed-husk again. But you cannot get back into your seed-husk, once it is cracked open and no longer yours.

Katherine Catmull

#2. And I love everything on this changing, burning earth, but I am most grateful to you.

Katherine Catmull

#3. Well, I don't care," said Bird out loud, said Bird, who cared so much that she couldn't bear to touch the hurt. "I don't care. I ran away from Summer, and I will make my own castle. I will be my own queen.

Katherine Catmull

#4. On water and light she runs.

Katherine Catmull

#5. You don't drown because you can't breathe. You drown because you try to breathe what is not breathable.

Katherine Catmull

#6. We have friends in every woods we walk through, though we walk through them not knowing.

Katherine Catmull

#7. We never really know what might be beside us or ahead, bust most days we walk as if we do.
(from uncorrected galley)

Katherine Catmull

#8. A map is a song. It's different when different people sing it ... You will make this your own song, sing it your own way.

Katherine Catmull

#9. She wasn't a cruel Bird. But her heart ached so badly for these sad, broken birds that, just as the Puppeteer had planned, she had begun to hate them. She hated them for making her feel so wretched, when she should be happiest. That happens sometimes.

Katherine Catmull

#10. Her grief was like the evening sun behind the trees when you ride your bicycle west: sometimes you get a glimpse between the branches, or you hit a bump in the road, and the sudden blaze of sun in your eyes hurts so much, it blinds you. But mostly you're just riding quietly along in the dusk. She

Katherine Catmull

#11. But when you find your soul, you have to go. When you find your true shape, when the wind lifts you up, when you remember who you are, you have to go.

Katherine Catmull

#12. In dreams and in making, you choose what you are. But you do not choose only once. Over and over, at every turning you must choose. This felt like a turning, a time to choose what she was.

Katherine Catmull

#13. That is what I love best about dreams, and about makings, good makings. They are folded-up buds of complications and mysteries, and if you stay with them patiently, they will unfold and unfold, and never stop unfolding. Dreams are flowers that never stop blooming.

Katherine Catmull

#14. Her voice was warm and husky as a clarinet, but not so sad as a clarinet: friendlier. When she laughed, it was like a clarinet blowing bubbles.

Katherine Catmull

#15. We never really know what might me beside us or ahead, but most days we walk as if we do

Katherine Catmull

#16. Seeing is 'making,' whether you see with your mind or your true self. Try to see with your self, your self and your beast together, and not your busy, frightened mind.

Katherine Catmull

#17. The bird music sank into her, like a song you used to know but forgot long ago. You hear a piano play it some day, and for a minute you feel a happy pain, but you don't know why. Bird felt like that.

Katherine Catmull

#18. She was only half Bird now, and the other half song. She liked it that way.

Katherine Catmull

#19. There is no safety, and so we must touch and be touched, and we must fall and fly.

Katherine Catmull

#20. On one of the right-side-up pages show wrote, with some difficulty, Know what roots know: there is only one tree.

Katherine Catmull

#21. The pinpoint flame of anger and grief becomes a hot needle, then a hot knife.
It melts the frost that binds her lips.
It melts the sea in her eyesss.
(from uncorrected galley)

Katherine Catmull

#22. How did you know," Summer would demand, and then decide: "It's probably a coincidence."
"It's not a coincidence," Bird would say. "It's just obvious. Your body just knows."
"But how do you know?"
"How do you know a story is a good story or not?" asked Bird. "Like that. you know like that.

Katherine Catmull