Katherine Howe
Katherine Howe is a #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning writer of historical fiction and nonfiction. Her best known books are The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2009 and was named one of USA Today's top ten books of the year, and Conversion, which received the 2015 Massachusetts Book Award in young adult literature. In 2014 she edited The Penguin Book of Witches for Penguin Classics, a primary source reader on the history of witchcraft in England and North America. She co-authored the #1 bestselling Vanderbilt: the Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty with CNN's Anderson Cooper, which came out in September 2021. Their next collaboration, Astor: the Rise and Fall of an American Fortune will release September 19, 2023. And her next novel, A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself will be out November 21. 2023. She holds a BA in art history and philosophy from Columbia and an MA in American and New England studies from Boston University, A native Houstonian, she lives in New England with her family. She also puts hot sauce on everything.
“Only by being present can you be happy. Too much attention to the past and the future takes the now away. And once it's gone, you never get it back.”
“Of course, it was a rather hard lot, to be cherished. The beloved can so easily disappoint when they inevitably prove to be human.”
“She slipped into this rhythm without thinking about it, like a clock that moved its hands without knowing why.”
“In this world, everyone is friends with everyone else. In a way.”
“Her freckles were delectable. Most fellows didn't care for freckles as a rule, thinking they were tough-looking. But Betty's were appealing. Like cake batter you could wipe off with your thumb, buttery and sweet.”
“Mentally Connie gathered her strands of thinking into thick handfuls, trying to braid them into a coherent whole.”
“The philosophers stone is just an allegory. It represents everything that man wants and can never have.”
“None on the Court be well disposed to the hearing of reason,I'm afraid. They are gripped with fear for their own reputations.”
“But remember. Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean it isn't real.”
“Everyone has wounds as want healing. Seems like they all find me.”
“She was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls. To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees an shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full.”
“In his voice resonated the timbre of a man who thinks he has convinced himself of an idea, but masks his own doubt by laboring to persuade others.”
“...You can have this whole entire life, with all your opinions, your loves, your fears. Eventually those parts of you disappear. And then the people who could remember those parts of you disappear, and before long, all that's left is your name in some ledger. This...person -- she had a favorite food. She had friends and people she disliked. We don't even know how she died...I guess that's why I like preservation better than history. In preservation I feel like I can keep some of it from slipping away.”
“Just because you don't believe it[] [...]doesn't mean that it's not true.”
“God shields the souls of the innocent the best He can from the Devil's torments.”
“Of course mothers and daughters with strong personalities might see the world from very different points of view.”