Top 100 Cath Crowley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I told her yeah, but there was no skin on my voice and she heard the bones in my words like I did. And I knew.”

— Cath Crowley

52. “For a while, for as long as you’re looking at it, that painting is the world and you get to be in it.”

— Cath Crowley

53. “Sometimes a memory is a thing that can’t be explained using words.”

— Cath Crowley

54. “They don’t wait for something to happen. They wait to happen to something.”

— Cath Crowley

55. “I guess there are a lot of people who don’t know the right thing to say. You don’t notice them so much because they pretend they do.”

— Cath Crowley

56. “Open your eyes, Charlie love,′ Mum whispers. ‘You’ll miss out on the day.’ Not a lot to miss out on, really. My days have been sort of shakey lately. Like a voice running out of breath. Like a hand playing the blues. Like a girl losing her bikini top in the pool at Jeremy Magden’s final party for Year 10 last week, if we’re getting specific. Mum says look on the bright side. Okay. I guess I was only half naked.”

— Cath Crowley

57. “And I look at him because he needs to be looked at. He needs to be seen. I hate that he has been on his own for so long painting graffiti moons in the dark keeping quiet about who he really is.”

— Cath Crowley

58. “If a person wants to spend forever with you, that’s Love.”

— Cath Crowley

59. “That’s what we think because we can’t imagine what it’s like to not exist.”

— Cath Crowley

60. “I’m fond of Derek Walcott too. I could eat his poem “Love After Love.” Just peel the words off the page and stuff them in my mouth.”

— Cath Crowley

61. “Life is the big scheme; death is the little one at the end.”

— Cath Crowley

62. “The memories are in the words. And from that the strange thought comes that my memories are trapped in all the copies of this poem, and so everyone who’s reading it, no matter what copy, has my memories without knowing it.”

— Cath Crowley

63. “Kept dreaming of this spot she had on her neck, this tiny country. I wanted to visit, to paint a picture of what I found there, a wall with a road map of her skin.”

— Cath Crowley

64. “I wonder how she could forget about it, a thing like that. And I wonder how she can go on living if she doesn’t.”

— Cath Crowley

65. “Words can’t save people from cancer or bring people back from the dead. Novels can’t either. They don’t have a practical use, that’s what I meant. I loved that you read that poem to me that night, but the world remained unchanged.”

— Cath Crowley

66. “I am filled with the thought that there’s nothing more thrilling than all those things in your future, waiting to be known.”

— Cath Crowley

67. “What’s the point in living on past the moment when those we have loved have left us? And how can we ever forgive ourselves for letting them go?”

— Cath Crowley

68. “Secondhand books are haunted, according to him. Ghosts in the pages.”

— Cath Crowley

69. “A dry, bookless world. It’s too bleak to even imagine.”

— Cath Crowley

70. “Doesn’t love fall somewhere in the big scheme of things? Isn’t it the biggest scheme?”

— Cath Crowley

71. “Sometimes, the end begins.”

— Cath Crowley

72. “So this is what water feels like, I think, the second before it can’t hold on any longer. This is what it feels like, the second after it lets go.”

— Cath Crowley

73. “Secondhand books are full of mysteries, which is why I like them. Frederick.”

— Cath Crowley

74. “I pull the blanket around my shoulders, and the customer looking at the classics section gives me a sympathetic look. I give him one back because, as much as I love books, if you are in the classic’s section first thing in the morning, then there’s something not entirely right with your life either.”

— Cath Crowley

75. “Gorilla, a guy who got his name because he’s hairy and because his arms are so long his knuckles scrape the floor. He’s grinning and moving closer and she’s blocked in on all sides by a mass of bodies. I look at her and him. I look at the window. I think back to our date. She can always break his nose if he gets too friendly. I jump through, land on the grass, and turn around. Who am I kidding? I want to see it if she breaks his nose.”

— Cath Crowley

76. “I love lying here with you, under the books.”

— Cath Crowley

77. “Shitness, my sister says, has a momentum that good luck just doesn’t have.”

— Cath Crowley

78. “And then we’re at that moment when you both go and get what you want or you both go back. The moment when you say, Stuff being scared; what’s on the other side is better. That moment when you inch closer to each other little by little, till your skin starts and ends in the same place. Till your faces get so close your lips start and end in the same place, too. Till you taste milk shake and salt and sugar days and the world spins and the stars sound like harmonicas.”

— Cath Crowley

79. “I hate the thought that you might forget and remember, forget and remember. I think that must be exhausting. You have my phone number, any time you require me to carry you home in a storm.”

— Cath Crowley

80. “I come out of the bathroom and the first thing I see is Ed. Okay, it was a long shot, but I was half hoping he would cease to exist while we were gone.”

— Cath Crowley

81. “I think she likes post-apocalyptic fiction so much because she’s genuinely happy at the thought that the world might end.”

— Cath Crowley

82. “Jazz tells Lucy to relax and tries to kick her under the table. I know this because she kicks me instead. “Aim more to the left,” I tell her, and she has another go. “Farther left,” I say, and enjoy watching her hit the target a couple of times.”

— Cath Crowley

83. “They can’t see me but I can see them. I don’t stand because I’ve been standing all morning. Plus, this is my small protest against Luke and Rose. I can’t serve you if I don’t exist. Get lost in that existential dilemma.”

— Cath Crowley

84. “I know a few things about ghosts. The only way to stop them getting inside you is to spend every second of the day thinking about something else. Fighting like that makes you tired, and it doesn’t matter how hard you fight anyway. They chip till they make a crack, and before you know it there’s a ghost squatter in your living room. It’s hard to get them out. Hard because they settle in. Hard because you like the company.”

— Cath Crowley

85. “He said the seconds were pouring off people, tiny glowing dots pouring from their skins, only no one could see them.”

— Cath Crowley

86. “Memory can transmigrate, from the dead to the living.”

— Cath Crowley

87. “Mum and I were both there at the moment that Cal died, and sometimes I worry that seeing that has altered something so fundamental about us. Sometimes I worry we lost some of our humanness that day, and It’s not coming back.”

— Cath Crowley

88. “The past is with me; the future is unmapped and changeable. Ours for the imagining, spreading out before us.”

— Cath Crowley

89. “Do people have a choice in the direction their lives will go? We cannot choose where and when we are born, by whom or how we are first loved, or with whom we will fall in love – at least, I do not believe so. And we cannot choose who is taken from us, or the way in which they are taken.”

— Cath Crowley

90. “Do people have a choice in the direction their lives will go? We cannot choose where and when we are born, by whom or how we are first loved, or with whom we will fall in love – at least, I do not believe so. And we cannot choose who is taken from us, or the way in which we are taken... But I do 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

91. “I’m thinking of the transmigration of memory. Not the transmigration that happened in the Borges story, but the transmigration of memory that happens all the time – saving people the only way we can – holding the dead here with their stories, with their marks on the page, with their histories. It’s a very beautiful idea, and, I decide, entirely possible.”

— Cath Crowley

92. “I don’t think you can date a letter like this. A love letter, by definition, should be timeless or what’s the point? I love you, but only for 2012 and then my love expires? What’s the universe’s problem with forever?”

— Cath Crowley

93. “While I’m spreading butter, I think about how I like the noise in Rose’s house, lines of music, threaded and knotted over the top of one another. Knives hitting plates, chairs scraping floor, kids screaming, her dad’s slippers shuffling his solo, “Can’t a Man Get Any Sleep Around Here?” Mixed together it sounds like a little kitchen symphony.”

— Cath Crowley

94. “The world is complex, he told me. Humans are too.”

— Cath Crowley

95. “If we all gave up on the things we love when it gets hard, it’d be a terrible world.”

— Cath Crowley

96. “I mean words don’t stop us from dying. They don’t give us the dead back. Death is the biggest in the big scheme of things.”

— Cath Crowley

97. “I wonder if the future sends us hints to get us ready, so that the grief doesn’t kill us when it comes.”

— Cath Crowley

98. “I can live without a definite future as long as you’re in that indefinite future with me.”

— Cath Crowley

99. “Perhaps all things that are worthwhile are terrifying?”

— Cath Crowley

100. “You have to start living again sometime.”

— Cath Crowley