Top 35 Katarina Bivald Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Don’t ever argue with an idiot. They’ll drag you down to their level and then beat you with their experience.”

— Katarina Bivald

2. “For as long as she could remember, she had thought that autumn air went well with books, that the two both somehow belonged with blankets, comfortable armchairs, and big cups of coffee or tea.”

— Katarina Bivald

3. “This is a small town, so everyone talks. Ironic, isn’t it – so few people, so many opinions?”

— Katarina Bivald

4. “People were strange like that. They could be completely uninterested in you, but the moment you picked up a book, you were the one being rude.”

— Katarina Bivald

5. “Very few people had sense enough to appreciate silence.”

— Katarina Bivald

6. “People expected too much from forgiveness.”

— Katarina Bivald

7. “In books, people were charming and friendly, and life followed certain set patterns. If a person dreamed of doing something, then you could be almost certain that, by the end of the book, they would almost certainly be doing that very thing. And they would find someone to do it with. In the real world, you could be almost certain that person would end up doing absolutely anything other than what they had dreamed of. “They’re.”

— Katarina Bivald

8. “I think I’ve lived a happy life. I know I’ve been lucky. I’ve had good friends and kind people around me.”

— Katarina Bivald

9. “As long as she had books and money, nothing could be a catastrophe.”

— Katarina Bivald

10. “That which didn’t kill them made them stranger.”

— Katarina Bivald

11. “There’s always a person for every book. And a book for every person.”

— Katarina Bivald

12. “If he had learned anything in life, it was that there were no happy endings. Life simply went on.”

— Katarina Bivald

13. “She had never been someone who believed you needed to have met in person to be friends – many of her most rewarding relationships had been with people who didn’t even exist.”

— Katarina Bivald

14. “I know there are those who doubt that racism is still such a big problem, but if you ask me, it’s only middle-aged people who think that, those who think the world has automatically become better simply because they’re old enough to shape it now, but without any of them having made the slightest contribution to improving it.”

— Katarina Bivald

15. “That’s what books are for,” Sara said, smiling at him. “The perfect excuse to do nothing. Make no decisions.”

— Katarina Bivald

16. “One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turn out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it.”

— Katarina Bivald

17. “I’m not going to go to Denver and leave you in peace just to make life easier for you,” he said. “Isn’t that the point of attraction? That it makes life more interesting?”

— Katarina Bivald

18. “I’ve always thought that books have some kind of healing power and that they can, if nothing else, provide a distraction.”

— Katarina Bivald

19. “She always tried to be a fair person, so she made an effort not to judge him for it. But the fact remained that she was instinctively suspicious of a fit body. So often, they seemed to be entirely incompatible with other qualities – like intelligence or kindness or even basic politeness.”

— Katarina Bivald

20. “There was something so tragically simple about a dance ending. A hand leaving a shoulder, a waist. Two hands unclasping and letting go of one another. Just like that.”

— Katarina Bivald

21. “A complete waste of time – doubting yourself. If you make the slightest mistake, someone else is sure to let you know about it.”

— Katarina Bivald

22. “She had asked herself whether this life was really enough. And that had scared her, because what else was there other than books and work?”

— Katarina Bivald

23. “It was funny, she thought, how often we stuck to the safe path in life, pulling on blinders and keeping our eyes to the ground, doing our best not to look at the fantastic view. Without seeing the heights we had reached, the opportunities actually awaiting us out there; without realizing we should just jump and fly, at least for a moment.”

— Katarina Bivald

24. “Isn’t it funny that you can be together with men who are so wrong for you that afterward you feel like you’ve been “cured” of them?′ Said Claire. ‘Like a cold. You get them, you get cured, you move on.”

— Katarina Bivald

25. “Never live your life according to the idiots’ rules. Because they’ll drag you down to their level, they’ll win, and you’ll have a damned awful time in the process.”

— Katarina Bivald

26. “Maybe that proves I was right about books and people: books are fantastic and probably come into their own in a cabin in the woods, but how fun is it to read a fantastic book if you can’t tell others about it, talk about it, quote from it constantly?”

— Katarina Bivald

27. “The real crime of these lists isn’t that they leave deserving books off them, but that they make people see fantastic literary adventures as obligations. You.”

— Katarina Bivald

28. “What the hell is life if it’s not chores and working and making dinner, and then starting all over again?”

— Katarina Bivald

29. “You’ve got to be something of a dreamer to enjoy books, at least to begin with.”

— Katarina Bivald

30. “Books that had already been read were the best.”

— Katarina Bivald

31. “I’m Grace,” she said. “Or truth be told, my name’s Madeleine. But there’s no point calling me that.”

— Katarina Bivald

32. “Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them.”

— Katarina Bivald

33. “Sara couldn’t help but think that she had somehow missed the moment when life was meant to begin. For a long time she had simply drifted through it, reading. While everyone around her was teenaged, unhappy, and foolish, this hadn’t been a problem. But then suddenly everyone had grown up around her, and she had done nothing but read.”

— Katarina Bivald

34. “An incomplete series could be catastrophic, even for those around you.”

— Katarina Bivald

35. “Can you smell it? The scent of new books. Unread adventures. Friends you haven’t met yet, hours of magical escapism awaiting you.”

— Katarina Bivald

36. “Reading books isn’t a bad way to live you life.”

— Katarina Bivald

37. “That night, Sara sat in Amy’s library for hours, thinking about how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, and grieving for her, the woman she had never met.”

— Katarina Bivald

38. “As early as high school, she had realized that few people paid attention to you if you were hidden behind a book.”

— Katarina Bivald

39. “I’ve had my sorrows, of course, but nothing more than I could cope with. Sometimes I think that it’s not the degree of sorrow which matters, but how much of a hold it can get. Maybe some people are just more susceptible, or maybe everyone is more susceptible at certain times.”

— Katarina Bivald