Catherine McKenzie Quotes

That I'd been letting life act itself out on me when I should have been directing it.

Life is made up of turning points. Forks in the road. We make choices every day that take us down one path over another. The thing I've learned is, there generally aren't any signposts along the way.

I stare off into space for a minute. "I just wish my life would go back to the way it was."
"Why?"
"Because I was happy then. Things weren't perfect, but still, I knew where I fit. I knew where I was going."
"And you don't feel that way anymore?"
"No. I feel kind of ... lost in the middle of my own life, if that makes any sense.

Like how there's this optimal money/happiness equation. Once you pass a certain amount of household income, life isn't any better. Apparently, money can't buy happiness, or it does, but it costs less than you imagined it would.

You can quit if you want. If you hate it. If it isn't fun anymore. I'll back you with Dad. But you can't quit just because it's hard. Things are hard for most people. Life is hard.

I don't think that bad actions erase good ones. Not really.

It's hard to find someone you'd rather spend time with than not.

It's just how love gets described in the movies. Like in Sleepless in Seattle ... " This is the movie they showed us last night. "Tom Hanks's character is musing about why he fell in love with his dead wife, and he says that it was because she could peel an apple in one long strip, or something like that. And I was reading something similar in a book recently, only that was about peeling an orange ... anyway ... I've just never felt like the way someone peels fruit would be a reason to spend the rest of your life with them.

His mouth tastes like Scotch, and feels familiar, like somewhere I've been before.

It's all because of the video cameras. Standard issue in daycares these days: twelve cameras (six in the baby room, six in the toddler room), all strategically positioned so any concerned parent can watch their child all day long via streaming video if they want to.

There are so many versions of the truth, I've found. One for each person. But the whole truth? No one ever tells the whole truth. Do they?

One person can't fulfill every role in someone's life.

We all wear a mask. The trick is keeping it in place.

I don't need my heart anymore, you can have it. Cut it out, put it in a box, bury it in the hard ground, next to you. My eyes are useless too. They only show me a world without you. Color blind, color absent, colorless. And my mind screams, Not fair! Not right. Not what I was promised on the swing set as you pushed me toward the sun. None of the stories you read me schooled me for this. I didn't learn this lesson in the moon, or on the train, or as a thing to be curious about. So I don't need my heart anymore, you can have it. Let it be buried, in the hard ground, next to you.

Love isn't simple, Katie, and neither is life. Things that are worth having are sometimes complicated, and they evoke complicated emotions. You know, one of the reasons people often turn to alcohol or drugs is that they can't deal with complications.

Her departure was a gradual thing, like a watercolor left in the sun, every day fainter until one day the canvas was bare and you had to rely on memory to recapture the image.

It seemed like almost nothing had happened, but that almost nothing changed everything for me.

We all wear masks. The challenge is keeping them in place.

Suppose I say summer, write the word "hummingbird," put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you.

Life doesn't wait. You have to make it happen. You have to live it while it's happening around you. Life moves on.