Christina Baker Kline Quotes

out and folding it against

You got to learn to take what people are willing to give.

He squints at me. "Except for the red hair and freckles, you look okay. You'll be fine and dandy sitting at the table with a napkin on your lap.

If I am honest...I will say that I simply need a warm, dry place to live. I want enough food to eat, clothes, and shoes that will protect me from the cold. I want calmness and order. More than anything, I want to feel safe in my bed.

To get it all done I have to dim my brain, turn it down by notches like the flat-turn knob on a gas lantern, leaving only a nub of flame.

I feel a joy so strong it's almost painful - a knife's edge of joy.

When I start a new novel and find myself diverted by domestic activities, many of which I genuinely enjoy, I panic that I will never write another word.

I did love him. But I did not love him like I loved Dutchy: beyond reason. Maybe you only get one of those in a lifetime, I don't know. But it was all right. It was enough.

Mamey said that in her day a woman who had not married by the age of thirty was called a thornback, named after a flat, spiny, prehistoric-looking fish.

It was pouring earlier, great sheets of rain, and now the clouds outside the window are crystal tipped like mountain peaks in the sky, rays emanating downward like an illustration in a children's bible.

Having the book-club army embrace you is a gift that keeps giving for years.

We are headed toward the unknown, and we have no choice but to sit quietly in our hard seats and let ourselves be taken there.

The stark gray sky and bare tree limbs feel more suited to her than the uncomplicated promise of sunny spring days.

I think you're used to being observed but not really ... seen.

Tough and weird is preferable to pathetic and vulnerable ...

Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she's come to expect it. When something does go right, she hardly knows what to think.

There was never a cataclysmic moment in which things might have been, however briefly, etched in relief against memory, against things to come - a moment which, by its sheer magnitude, defined her history and her future. Instead, Kathryn thinks, she has disintegrated slowly over a number of years.

There are many ways to be crippled, I've learned over the years, many forms of paralysis.

It's hard to say what's in my head. It's been a long time since anyone cared to ask.

Book clubs, both online and in person, have become a large percentage of the reading public, and many of them won't consider reading books in hardcover.

Maybe it doesn't matter how much gets done. Maybe the value is in the process - in touching each item, in naming and identifying, in acknowledging the significance of a cardigan, a pair of children's boots. "It's

Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.

Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts? ... Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts ... They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind."
"Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles."
"The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin.

I have three sons, as different from each other as any three humans could be but connected by their shared love of Guitar Hero. I'm lucky to be married to a man I can call my soulmate without any irony whatsoever.

Richard knows a bar that's open until two and they go off in search of it, the two girls tottering on their heels and swaying against the men, who seem all too happy to support them.

When I was seventeen I went to college to escape my father's impotent rage and my mother's infinite capacity for forgiveness.

Easier to assume that people have it out for you than to be disappointed when they don't come through.

I can't imagine why you didn't memorize this route on the

People who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles.

This isn't bickering. This is classic mother-daughter communications. I've been reading up on it.

I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.

Life's small details are the ones that interest me, anyway. The big questions are too hard to parse.

As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.

So I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display empathy I do not feel. I am learning to pass, to look like everyone else, even though I feel broken inside.

She should be grateful. Without Vivian she'd be sliding down a dark path toward nowhere good . But it kind of feels nice to nurture her resentment, to foster it. It's something she can savor and control, this feeling of having been wronged by the world. That she has fulfilled her role as a thieving member of the underclass, now indentured to this genteel midwestern white lady, is too perfect for words.

I have found that the biggest moments in life, the ones that change everything, usually catch you by surprise.

That the quickest relief will come in forgetting.

Every decision I make is determined solely by the spark and limitations of my own perspective

That man would have chipped away at your heart bit by bit until there was nothing left. It may have been bruised, but at least it's whole.

For a few years, skeins of yarn piled up in baskets around the house. There weren't enough humans in my mother's orbit to wear all the scarves and sweaters and hats she knitted. And then, as suddenly as she started, she lost interest, leaving needles still entwined in half-finished fragments.

You can't find peace until you fin fall the pieces.

Options. She can sleep with the door open, wander around freely, come and go without someone watching her every move. She hadn't realized how much of a toll the years of judgment and criticism, implied and expressed, have taken on her. It's as if she's been walking on a wire, trying to keep her balance, and now, for the first time, she is on solid ground.

Ever since I was a little girl I had wanted to be

In the strange, shadowed lighting of my small room Dutchy takes off his belt and dress shirt and hangs them over the only chair. He stretches out on the bed in his undershirt and trousers, his back against the wall, and I lean against him, feeling his body curve around mine. His warm breath is on my neck, his arm on my waist. I wonder for a moment if he'll kiss me. I want him to.
"How can this be?" he murmurs. "It isn't possible. I've dreamed of it. Have you?"
I don't know what to say. I never dared to imagine that I'd see him again. In my experience, when you lose somebody you care about, they stay gone.
"What's the best thing that happened to you in the past ten years?" I ask.
"Seeing you again,"
Smiling, I push back against his chest. "Besides that"
"Meeting you the first time."
We both laugh. "Besides that."
"Hmm, besides that," he muses, his lips on my shoulder. "Is there anything besides that?" he pulls me close, his hand cupping my hip bone. And though I've never done anything like this before - have barely ever been alone with a man, certainly not a man in his undershirt - I'm not nervous. When he kisses me, my whole body hums.

You are only as interesting as you are useful to someone

Most people are remarkably resilient. Even those who have been through war or great loss often find reservoirs of strength. But the legacy of trauma is a heavy burden to bear.

People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn't. Not really. He wasn't even in the field; he conjured it from a room in the house, an entirely different angle. He removed rocks and trees and outbuildings. The scale of the barn is wrong. And I am not that frail young thing, but a middle-aged spinster. It's not my body, really, and maybe not even my head. He

It's painful to hold out hope for the things that once brought you joy. You have to find ways to make yourself forget.

It's human nature to want to think the best of others, but if you listen carefully, people will always tell you who they are.

Turtles carry their homes on their backs." Running her finger over the tattoo, she tells him what her dad told her: "They're exposed and hidden at the same time. They're a symbol of strength and perseverance.

...wage an ongoing war with the elements...we have to push back against the unruly outdoors to keep chaos at bay.

My parents are a bedrock. And I have three complex, strong, and funny sisters who inspire and sustain me.

It's a bitter nostalgia from a moment not yet passed.

The reading part of her feels private, between her and the characters in a book.

The first twenty-three years of my life are the ones that shaped me, and the fact

Each moment of loss, she has come to believe, contains within it the possibility of a new life. When the unimaginable happens, and your life changes irrevocably, you may find along with the pain a kind of grace. And in the place of certainty and fear - the fear of losing what you had - you are left with something startling: a depth of empathy, a quivering sensitivity to the world around you, and the unexpected blessing of gratitude for what remains.

Upright and do right make all right.

I am acutely aware that like a slip of paper in the wind, something in his nature eludes my grasp.

I think of what Mamey told me long ago: there are many ways to love and be loved. Too bad it's taken most of a lifetime for me to understand what that means.

Servants, men in top hats and morning coats, shop girls in

I ... am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go.

Look, I don't mean to be rude, but you could never have a normal life, even if that's what you thought you wanted. You and me, we're not 'normal.

I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort. It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn't.

All were given one chance to step into a happily ever after- or at least it must have seemed that way. But was it the prince who attracted them, or merely the opportunity to escape?

After about half an hour, Mr. Sorenson turns onto a narrow unpaved road. Dirt rises around us as we drive, coating the windshield and side windows. We pass more fields and then a copse of birch tree skeletons, cross through a dilapidated covered bridge over a murky stream still sheeted with ice, turn down a bumpy dirt road bordered by pine trees. Mr. Sorenson is holding a card with what looks like directions on it. He slows the truck, pulls to a stop, looks back toward the bridge. Then he peers out the grimy windshield at the trees ahead. "No goldarn signs," he mutters. He puts his foot on the pedal and inches forward. Out

The most surprising thing, honestly, is that so few Americans know about the orphan trains. I was also surprised at the resilience and fortitude of the riders I met, their pragmatism and grace. I don't know whether this is a Midwestern trait or simply a human one.

We both start laughing - at the absurdity of our shared experience, the relief of recognition. We cling to each other like survivors of a shipwreck, astonished that neither of us drowned.

You can't find peace until you find all the pieces. She wants to help Vivian find some kind of peace, elusive and fleeting as it may be.

No substitute for the living, perhaps, but I wasn't given a choice. I could take solace in their presence or I could fall down in a heap, lamenting what I'd lost. The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on.

We mark the days by chores that need to be done, the way farm families have always done. Al feeds the hens and horses and pigs, splits wood in the fall, slaughters a pig when the weather turns cold, cuts ice in the winter. I collect eggs from the laying hens and Al drives me into town to sell them. He times the planting so that by the Fourth of July we'll have new peas and by September there's a whole field of corn. Gulls lunge for a feast, ravaging the crop, so Al kills a few and hangs them from poles as warning. During haying season in midsummer, I see him from the dining room window in his visored cap, scything the hay by hand with six hired men walking abreast, forking the newly mown hay onto the hayrack. They haul the hay to the barn, where a block-and-tackle hoist lifts it into the mow.

And so your personality is shaped. You know too much, and this knowledge makes you wary. You grow fearful and mistrustful. The expression of emotion does not come naturally, so you learn to fake it. To pretend. To display an empathy you don't actually feel.

We took away their country and their means of support. It was for this and against this that they made war. Could anyone expect less?

I will not serve lunch to anyone in the middle of a workday. I rarely rearrange my furniture or cabinets; once I find a drawer for something, it stays there. I don't garden. And I don't knit.

What she wants most - what she truly yearns for - is what any of us want: to be seen.

I know all too well how it is when the beautiful visions you've been fed don't match up with reality.

Hardcovers will never completely disappear. They are delightful to hold; they feel weighty and substantial. But my anecdotal evidence suggests that the world is changing.

In Kinvara, poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn't know until we left how much we took those things for granted.

neighborhood, the place I left each

It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past.

But it kind of feels nice to nurture her resentment, to foster it. It's something she can savor and control, this feeling of having been wronged by the world.

I count a hundred steps and start again. My da used to say it's good to test your limits now and then, learn what the body is capable of, what you can endure. He said this when we were in the throes of sickness on the Agnes Pauline, and again in the bitter first winter in New York, when four of us, including Mam, came down with pneumonia. Test your limits. Learn what you can endure. I am doing that.

I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over and over again.

Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They're passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.

When you can type a few words into a search engine and land on your topic - or when you can scan a Shakespeare play for specific words or symbols - what opportunities might you miss to expand your thinking in unexpected ways?

mixed together - because Dina refuses to acknowledge

All those children sent on trains to the Midwest - collected off the streets of New York like refuse, garbage on a barge, to be sent as far away as possible, out of sight.

Mrs. Scatcherd raps Dutchy's knuckles several times with a long wooden ruler, though it seems to me a halfhearted penalty. He barely winces, then shakes his hands twice in the air and winks at me. Truly , there isn't much more she can do. Stripped of family and identity, fed meager rations, consigned to hard wooden seats until we are to be, as Slobbery Jack suggested, sold into slavery - our mere existence is punishment enough.

As a week. She's been spanked with a spatula, slapped across

If you really want to know me, I said, we'll have to start with the witches.

And so it is that you learn how to pass, if you're lucky, to look like everyone else, even though you're broken inside.

Story. (And anyway, Lori doesn't ask "why" questions. She's only

Only the good Lord knows what's going to happen, and He ain't telling.

And even if she loses the charms, she thinks, they'll always be a part of her. The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin. People get tattoos to have a permanent reminder of things they love or believe or fear, but though she'll never regret the turtle, she has no need to ink her flesh again to remember the past. She had not known the markings would be etched so deep. A

I love you," he writes again and again. "I can't bear to live without you. I'm counting the minutes until I see you." The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less cliched. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe.

Know what a symbol is? ... Shit that stands for shit.

EPIGRAPH "There was a very strange connection. One of those odd collisions that happen. We were a little alike; I was an unhealthy child that was kept at home. So there was an unsaid feeling between us that was wonderful, an utter naturalness. We'd sit for hours and not say a word, and then she'd say something, and I'd answer her. A reporter once asked her what we talked about. She said, 'Nothing foolish.'" - Andrew Wyeth

Other resources I relied on during my orphan train research were the Children's Aid Society; the New York Foundling (I attended their 140th homecoming in 2009 and met a number of train riders there); the New York Tenement Museum;

Dina listens to conservative talk radio, belongs to a fundamentalist Christian church, and has a "Guns don't kill people - abortion clinics do" bumper sticker on her car.

Forgive me if I'm wrong. But are you-were you-did you come here on a train from New York about ten years ago?

It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.