Top 100 Cath Crowley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s harder to make someone laugh than it is to make them cry.”

— Cath Crowley

2. “I need the shade of blue that rips your heart out. You don’t see that type of blue around here.”

— Cath Crowley

3. “People keep calling it an accident. That snake bit me on purpose. I’ve named it Sneaky. Sneaky had it all planned. I saw its face.”

— Cath Crowley

4. “I guess love’s kind of like a marshmallow in a microwave on high. After it explodes it’s still a marshmallow. but, you know, now it’s a complicated marshmallow.”

— Cath Crowley

5. “Remember Love doesn’t make the world go round Sex makes it spin for a second or two If you’re lucky So do chips, sausage rolls and girls in short skirts Remember Love Lays its fingers on your heart And holds it Under water Remember that When the next girl smiles.”

— Cath Crowley

6. “If you treat glass right, it doesn’t crack. If you know the properties, you can make things; the color of dusk and night and love. But you can’t control people like that and I really, really wish you could. I want the world to be glass.”

— Cath Crowley

7. “I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Looking for cops. Looking for anyone I don’t want to be here. Paint sails and the things that kick in my head scream from can to brick. See this, see this. See me emptied onto a wall.”

— Cath Crowley

8. “You were right. Real is better. The truth is better. It makes you feel kind of stupid, but it’s better.”

— Cath Crowley

9. “There was no skin on my voice and she heard the bones in my words.”

— Cath Crowley

10. “Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind... Memory can transmigrate, from the dead to the living...”

— Cath Crowley

11. “We’ll meet and click and sit up all night and everything will tip out of me and into him and the other way around and while we’re tipping the night will fade and the world will get pink and in that pinkness he’ll kiss me.”

— Cath Crowley

12. “Everything is what it is. I just wish it were something else.”

— Cath Crowley

13. “I liked that he had hair that was growing without a plan. A grin that came out of nowhere and left the same way.”

— Cath Crowley

14. “You’re always saying people don’t like you but people can’t like something that’s not there.”

— Cath Crowley

15. “I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what’s on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.”

— Cath Crowley

16. “The past is with me; the present is here. The future is unmapped and changeable. Ours for the imagining: spreading out before us. Sunlight filled, deep blue, and the darkness.”

— Cath Crowley

17. “It’s a different kind of missing. You’re trying to remember, and he’s trying to forget.”

— Cath Crowley

18. “If you don’t want a generation of robots, fund the arts!”

— Cath Crowley

19. “Every time he looked at me I felt like I’d touched my tongue to the tip of a battery. In art class I’d watch him lean back and listen and I was nothing but zing and tingle. After a while, the tingle turned to electricity, and when he asked me out my whole body amped to a level where technically I should have been dead. I had nothing in common with a sheddy like him, but a girl doesn’t think straight when she’s that close to electrocution.”

— Cath Crowley

20. “Mum says when wanting collides with getting, that’s the moment of truth. I want to collide. I want to run right into Shadow and let the force spill our thoughts so we can pick each other up and pass each other back like piles of shiny stones.”

— Cath Crowley

21. “You can’t patch up someone forgetting about you. For the rest of your life you’ll always be worrying that they’ll forget about you the same way they did before.”

— Cath Crowley

22. “When wanting collides with getting, that’s the moment of truth. I want to collide.”

— Cath Crowley

23. “These must be the most depressing words in the history of love. I tried really hard to love you.”

— Cath Crowley

24. “Love’s like an egg. Break it, and you might still have almost every bit of yolk and white, but there’s no way you’re getting that back in the shell. And even if you could, there’d be still all the cracks.”

— Cath Crowley

25. “Most times I look at Shadow and Poet’s work, I see something different from what the words are telling me. I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what’s on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.”

— Cath Crowley

26. “We are the books we read and the things we love... Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind.”

— Cath Crowley

27. “I’ll never throw these small things away. There will never be a time when I don’t want them, all the tiny parts of Cal that made a life.”

— Cath Crowley

28. “But I don’t believe that the future gives us signs. I think that we look back and read the past with the present in our eyes.”

— Cath Crowley

29. “You’re weird,” she said, falling asleep. “But that’s okay. it makes me seem normal.”

— Cath Crowley

30. “Death is something we shy away from, except in literature or television, when we tend to stare right at it.”

— Cath Crowley

31. “I don’t believe that the future gives us signs. I think that we look back and read the past with the present in our eyes... Maybe you read to look forward, and start reading the future.”

— Cath Crowley

32. “It’s like he’s picking up parts of the world and showing them to me, saying, See? It’s beautiful.”

— Cath Crowley

33. “It’s the characters, mostly, not the world. It’s how people are when they’ve lost everything or when it’s dangerous to think for themselves.”

— Cath Crowley

34. “Art like that doesn’t need words. That painting tells you something by pulling you into it and pushing you out and you know what it’s saying without words being spoken.”

— Cath Crowley

35. “He smells the same – peppermint and cedar and a hint of old books.”

— Cath Crowley

36. “No one has anything to get up for. Life’s pointless and everyone just gets up anyway. That’s how the human race works,” she says, and hands me a coffee.”

— Cath Crowley

37. “I didn’t know that Cal had a crush on George, but he must have. He wouldn’t give Sea-Monkeys to just any girl.”

— Cath Crowley

38. “You can’t patch up someone forgetting about you. For the rest of your life you’ll always be worrying that they’ll forget about you the same way they did before. You’ll always know that they’d be a hundred percent fine without you but you wouldn’t be a hundred percent fine without them.”

— Cath Crowley

39. “Don’t go confusing stupidity with guts.” -Bert.”

— Cath Crowley

40. “Where have you gone, my love? After ten years together I think knowing this is more than my due. Write me one line to let me know where you are. So that I do not wonder, for the rest of our lives when I imagine you, what is the background to your face.”

— Cath Crowley

41. “Love of the things that make you happy is steady too – books, words, music, art – these are lights that reappear in a broken universe.”

— Cath Crowley

42. “We are the books we read and the things we love.”

— Cath Crowley

43. “Second hand books have a way of travelling, sure. But what travels forward can come back.”

— Cath Crowley

44. “Sometimes science isn’t enough. Sometimes you need the poets.”

— Cath Crowley

45. “The bookstore is a building, but it’s not only the building. It is the books inside. People are not only their bodies. And if there is no hope of saving the things we love in their original form, we must save them however we can.”

— Cath Crowley

46. “Get up, Henry,′ he says. ‘You’re fermenting. Tell him he’s fermenting, George.”

— Cath Crowley

47. “It’s when I’m around some people that my entire vocabulary goes on vacation. Like now, when Dave’s walking next to me wearing an old black singlet and board shorts and the tattoo of a bird on his wrist, every single word in my head except “no” and “huh” is lying somewhere on a beack getting a suntan.”

— Cath Crowley

48. “If my like for you was a football crowd, you’d be deaf ’cause of the roar. And if my like for you was a boxer, there’d be a dead guy lying on the floor. And if my like for you was sugar, you’d lose your teeth before you were twenty. And if my like for you was money, let’s just say you’d be spending plenty.”

— Cath Crowley

49. “Dad and I leave town in the early dark. It’s the second Sunday of the holidays, and we pack up the old blue car with enough clothes for summer and hit the road. It’s so early he’s wiping hills of sand piled in the corners of his eyes. I wipe a few tears from mine. Tears don’t pile, though. They grip and cling and slide in salty trails that I taste until the edge of the city.”

— Cath Crowley

50. “But I believe we have choices – how we love and how much, what we read, where we travel. How we live after the person we love has died or left us. Whether or not we decide to take the risk and live again.”

— Cath Crowley