Quotes from Catalyst

Laurie Halse Anderson ·  232 pages

Rating: (15.2K votes)


“Oppressive bastards, think they own the place. I told them that karma's going to kick their asses....”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Catalyst


“I wish I were three feet tall and he could pick me up and he still had a beard and he wore cotton sweaters that felt soft on my cheek and I could cry it all away and I would wipe my tears on his shoulder and I could suck my thumb and suck the end of my ponytail and he wouldn't tell me only babies did that and he would rock me on the front porch with the wind coming clean from the north and he would sing nursery rhymes with made-up words like Mom used to and he could teach me the alphabet again and how to walk and how to run and maybe I would do it better this time.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Catalyst


“I'm just going to pretend that a very good-smelling, incredibly warm stranger is sitting next to me, a harmless stranger.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Catalyst


“A teacher (a good teacher) is composed of molecules of education and intelligence, bonded together by patience and passion.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Catalyst


About the author

Laurie Halse Anderson
Born place: in Potsdam, New York, The United States
Born date October 23, 2018
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“There's nothing worse than a label to cement people's loyalties.”
― Greg Egan, quote from Schild's Ladder


“Little John, watching her standing next to her brother, half-glowering in the old Cecil manner and half-comforted by Robin's words, saw for a moment what it had been like for her as Will's litter sister. Some of what she was good at, and some of what she was bad at, as his pupil, came clear to him in that moment; and something else came clear to him too, but he set it aside so quickly that he allowed himself not to recognize it for what it was.”
― Robin McKinley, quote from The Outlaws of Sherwood


“Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale


“Life was good except for―oh, yes, there was always an except.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle


“The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning


Interesting books

Shepherding a Child's Heart
(8.7K)
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(3K)
The Essential Writin...
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Something, Maybe
(13.1K)
Something, Maybe
by Elizabeth Scott
Rising Tides
(26.4K)
Rising Tides
by Nora Roberts
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
(3.3K)
The Notebooks of Laz...
by Robert A. Heinlein
The Prophets
(795)
The Prophets
by Abraham Joshua Heschel

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.