Top 40 Cassandra Khaw Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What do you do when the funeral is over but your heart is still broken. When all the condolences have been spoken and the mourners have gone shuffling home, and you’re left to stare at the wall, so raw and empty that you don’t know if you’ll ever be whole again.”

— Cassandra Khaw

2. “Every child knows they’re going to outlive their parents, but understanding is no opiate, can only mitigate. Knowledge can only propagate a trust that someday this will be okay. But not yet, not yet.”

— Cassandra Khaw

3. “One of the most effective tricks in a gumshoe’s playbook is the act of silence. Wait. Let the other guy pull the trigger first. It costs you nothing, and it gets you everything.”

— Cassandra Khaw

4. “And for one infinitesimally brief moment, the universe peels open, and I can see everything – how physics and velocity and time intersects with the idea of a heaven above, how meta co-exist with the fundamental truth of their non-existence, how the sun can be a star can be a ball of dung rolled across the galaxy by a gargantuan beetle. Suddenly, it is all so clear.”

— Cassandra Khaw

5. “The world’s too full of trouble to adopt those that don’t belong to you.”

— Cassandra Khaw

6. “The world is made up of rituals. From the way you brush your teeth to how you show obeisance during religious ceremonies, it’s an endless list of interlocking behaviours seared into your unconscious self, charms against the madness of reality.”

— Cassandra Khaw

7. “Human is very similar to pork, after all.”

— Cassandra Khaw

8. “Blues is about wanting and not having, about putting that need into someone else’s hands for a little while so you can pause and breathe.”

— Cassandra Khaw

9. “A decade of friendship teaches you a lot of things: the tics that separate I’m sorry and I’m sorry you caught me, that hangdog expression that is really code for when the other person’s expecting you to fix their mess.”

— Cassandra Khaw

10. “And you shall know her by the trail of dead.”

— Cassandra Khaw

11. “A long year spent making acquaintances with the demons inside you, each new day a fresh covenant. It does things to you. More specifically, it undoes things inside you. To have to barter for the bravery to go outside, pick up the phone, spend ten minutes assured in the upward trajectory of your recovery: that the appointments are enough, that you can be enough, that one day, this will be enough to make things okay again. All those things change you.”

— Cassandra Khaw

12. “There is a reason the hunt is central to so many narratives. For all that humanity professes to delighting in its own sophistication, it longs for simplicity, for when the world can be deboned into binaries: darkness and light, death and life, hunter and hunted.”

— Cassandra Khaw

13. “I could see why Lin defaulted to wit where he could. Easier to run your mouth, run from the Sisyphean work that was being emotionally open.”

— Cassandra Khaw

14. “You can’t move forward when someone keeps dragging you back.”

— Cassandra Khaw

15. “Every religion is a one-way relationship.”

— Cassandra Khaw

16. “Phillip kept going, his internal monologue, as always, so loud it couldn’t ever make space for collaboration.”

— Cassandra Khaw

17. “Compassion, like everything else, can be worn dull by rough use.”

— Cassandra Khaw

18. “He could have been a somebody but all he ever wanted to be was somebody to someone.”

— Cassandra Khaw

19. “My venom exists in the shape of words, and I may use them however I please. If I so desire, I could dilute it’s potency, drip it into my prey’s ears for decades, until the victim slowly withers of self-loathing, unaware of what I have wrought.”

— Cassandra Khaw

20. “It is always interesting to see how often women are described as ravenous when it is the men who, without exception, take without thought of compensation.”

— Cassandra Khaw

21. “There is nothing wrong with being a monster.”

— Cassandra Khaw

22. “But it is aways my reflection, the eyes smudged of definition, the mouth blotted in shadow so it looks like there’s nothing but blackened teeth.”

— Cassandra Khaw

23. “Names are like selkie-skins, often carelessly attended, left in view of those who would misuse them. Utilized incorrectly, though, they can kill a man, can turn a girl to a thing of teeth and dead eyes, an appetite to devour worlds; can make infernos of maidens, phoenixes of bones who have been asleep for so long they’ve forgotten the shape of rage. Names have so much power.”

— Cassandra Khaw

24. “The street is getting dark, the pavement tiger-striped by halogen. It wears the fog like a dame’s best scarf, slightly jaunty, with an edge of challenge.”

— Cassandra Khaw

25. “It wasn’t charitable but apologies didn’t exonerate the sinner, only compelled graciousness from its recipient.”

— Cassandra Khaw

26. “You would be amazed by what you can do when you have faith, when you know how to commoditize someone else’s faith, when you know the trick of words like hold on and tomorrow.”

— Cassandra Khaw

27. “He could have been a somebody but all he ever wanted to be was somebody to someone, a husband, a family man, a dream he’d coddled since he was ten.”

— Cassandra Khaw

28. “Ha. Get used to it, ang moh. The juicy hot dog of life is best enjoyed between two puns.”

— Cassandra Khaw

29. “We sagged into ourselves, small talk dispensed like so much recreational Valium.”

— Cassandra Khaw

30. “Man mistakes his own experiences as the canvas on which all truths are drawn.”

— Cassandra Khaw

31. “But the interior didn’t smell like it’d had people here, not for a long, long time, and smelled instead like such old buildings do: green and damp and dark and hungry, hollow as a stomach that’d forgotten what it was like to eat.”

— Cassandra Khaw

32. “We navigate by capitalism. Always had, probably always will. And one of the things about capitalism is it demands we think of our lives as in deficit. Not enough time, not enough material possessions, not enough luxuries. Not enough anything. Because contentment doesn’t sell. Desire does.”

— Cassandra Khaw

33. “We lunge together, two actors in a story so old that its rhythms are recorded in marrow, retold with every new birth, repeated with every fresh death.”

— Cassandra Khaw

34. “Media’s all about the gospel of the lone wolf, but the truth is we’re all just sheep.”

— Cassandra Khaw

35. “I said I was sorry, ” he barks, as though that one word is a confessional to be stuffed full with his sins. As though that one word could absolve everything.”

— Cassandra Khaw

36. “I didn’t know someone else’s pain could have a texture, a bite, a gelatinousness you could hold in your teeth, but I could almost gnaw on Phillip’s dying.”

— Cassandra Khaw

37. “Tell me: is your joy sweeter for your knowledge of what it is like to die? Do you enjoy every sunset better? Or does it stain you, follow like the whisper of a nightmare that will not end with your waking?”

— Cassandra Khaw

38. “Have you ever cannonballed into a cold lake? The shock of an old memory is kind of like that; every neuron singing a bright hosanna: here we are. You forgot about us, but we didn’t forget about you.”

— Cassandra Khaw

39. “Black goes with everything, especially blood stains.”

— Cassandra Khaw

40. “The dead miss the sun. It’s dark down there.”

— Cassandra Khaw

41. “This is the problem with horror movies: Everyone knows what’s coming next but actions have momentum, every decision an equal and justified reaction. Just because you know you should, doesn’t mean that you can, stop.”

— Cassandra Khaw

42. “Like any other subordinate of the hell, I’ve died a few times. Knife wound, explosions, minotaur-related disagreements, voluntary and incredibly athletic decisions to stop my own heart. The usual. But I’ve never been chewed up and digested by a dragon god. Which, I guess, is a class of experience above being eaten by a garden-variety lizard.”

— Cassandra Khaw