Katherine Center Quotes

The crash all those years ago shattered the life I had, but the pieces wound up making a pretty good mosaic. That's what art is, I suppose: transforming things from what they were into what they could be. My life now, without question, is transformed. Maybe that makes it a work of art.

Because the truth was, there was a dark underbelly of terror to motherhood. You loved your children with such an overwhelming fierceness that you were absolutely vulnerable at every moment of every day: They could be taken from you. Somehow, you could lose them. You could stop at the corner to buy a newspaper when a drunk driver veered onto the sidewalk. You could feed your child an E. coli-tainted hamburger. You could turn your head for a second while one darted out into the street. The threats to your child were infinite. And the thing was, if any of your children's lives were ruined, even a little bit, yours wold be, too.

However, the trouble with getting what you've always wanted is that once you have it, you have to worry that you'll lose it.

The world keeps hanging on to this idea that love is for the gullible. But nothing could be more wrong. Love is only for the brave.

We made a choice to do joy on purpose. Not in spite of life's sorrows. But because of them.

I don't want my kids to be like me. I want them to be better than me.

Beauty comes from tenderness.

I would never tell you that the life you wanted couldn't have been exactly as great as you planned. But you have to live the life you have. You have to find inspiration in the struggle, and pull joy out of the hardship. [...] Because that's all we can do: Carry the sorrow when we have to, and absolutely savor the joy when we can.

That's just the human condition, sweetheart. We're always doomed to waste our time.

I don't think trying to be happy means you can never be sad," I said. "Right?

I'm at my very best when things are at their very worst.

Whales have a highly evolved language that works like sonar. They have special neurons called spindle cells. Human have them, too, and they're linked with self-awareness, and compassion, and language. Except whales have had them about fifteen million years longer than we have.

It's not the easy moments that define who we are. It's the hard ones.

The lived on the mistaken assumption that their lives mattered, that life was essentially fair, that it was all going to wind up happy in the end. I knew what they didn't - that everything you care about will disappear, that deserving a happy life doesn't mean you can get one, and that there really is no one in the entire world you can count on but yourself.

That was the tricky part. You poured inordinate amounts of time and attention and affection into your kids, but the result was indirect. You didn't point out a cat to your one-year-old and then watch him, minutes later, say 'Cat.' Instead, you pointed out a hundred cats to your one-year-old and then, one day, watched him point to a cat and say 'Mama.

People are always beautiful when you love them.

I guess that's the upside of not being young anymore ... You know from experience that the struggle always leads, in some way, to something better.

The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.

And the way I loved her was like nothing else. This, I decided, was the love all other loves were measured against. They say girls look to marry their fathers, but I decided after having Maxie that we all, every one of us, were looking to marry our mothers. Sitting on the sofa with her wrapped in a soft blanket in my arms, I'd think, 'This baby has it so good.'
It just seemed that the love I'd been searching and hoping for all my life was what Maxie already had right now: two big arms and a lap, a warm blanket, the background music of a heartbeat and a pair of lungs, food at a moment's notice, sleep at every urge, and a person totally obsessed with her, whose every moment - waking or otherwise - was totally devoted to her comfort and care. Was that so much to ask for?

I have an affection for tangible objects, like books and pages, but people sure do seem to love their Kindles! We're definitely in the middle of a revolution that will determine how people find, read, and experience stories.

Well, for example, happy people are more likely to register joy than unhappy people. So if you take two people who have experienced a day of, say, fifty percent good things and fifty percent bad things, an unhappy person would remember more of the bad.

The best things about womanhood might possibly even be the conversations. The chatting. The gabbing. The whispering. The hands-on-hips eye-rolling. The yukking-it up.

We're just going to have to wait for-" Then she saw us, and looked Ian over, in his flannel shirt and jeans. "The Brawny paper-towel guy.

It's so easy to think that your strengths don't matter.

You can't understand this yet, but that's most of life: breaking your own promises to yourself.

I like to write about people who are real and likeable. I like to write about people who tell their stories in that close and intimate voice we use with best friends. I love the closeness and honesty and vulnerability that come from characters who can talk that way.

If you feel lucky, then you are.

He was like a Latino firefighting Ken doll - so bizarrely perfect, he wasn't even real.

Sometimes there is no way to hold your life together. Sometimes things just have to fall apart.

Because you absolutely never believe in yourself - and he finds a way to believe in you every damn day.

Don't let anyone convince you that love doesn't matter.

Our lives disappear, even as we live them.

I'd tried so hard to make a perfect, untouchable life for myself. But trouble finds you. Tragedy finds you. And we keep trying anyway. We hope for the best. We believe we can make something for ourselves- something good that will last- even though, at the exact same time, we know we can't.

We're looking for stories that speak to us. We're looking for stories that connect us with something true. But, instead, a lot of the time we get strippers. All I'm saying is, when boys are writing the stories, the percentage of strippers is bound to go up. And real stories about real women kinda don't get written at all.

Dying is easy. It's not dying that's hard.

Memos are never good things in the world of education - or maybe anywhere. If nothing else, they're usually dull, and repetitive, and, as Max always put it, TLTR - too long to read. Max had banished memos entirely before I even arrived - replacing them with IOMs - instead of meetings. These were basically ... memos. But Max enforced a strict, 100-word length, limited them to Fridays (when we were "almost free"), and emphasized that he was only sending them so we could avoid a MSM - a meeting that should've been a memo.

There is no question that the objects that surround us impact our experience of the world.

What matters most is how you respond to your heartbreaks and your disappointments and your fears. What matters most is who you become in response to them.

But the things we remember are what we hold on to, and what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives. We only get one story. And I am determined to make mine a good one.

Nothing that doesn't push you past your limits can change your life. It's true of work, it's true of parenting, and it's true - a hundred times over - of love.

And despite everything I know now, I still believe, as I did when I was little, that there is an entire universe of things that my mother knows that I don't. I still believe that nothing truly bad can ever happen if my mother is around. I know it's not true. But still. It is true.

You can't just wish strength for yourself. Or wisdom. Or resilience. Those things have to be earned.

We all carry our mothers inside us.

It's my battle cry: Appreciate Everything!

I felt like I had never really heard of a story that reflected the stuff I was going through as a mom. I came up with an idea for a story about motherhood that I would want to read.

Her's what I tell myself now. That it's vital to learn how to make the best of things. That there is no tenderness without bravery. That if things hadn't been so bad they could never have gotten so good. And that it's always better to have what you have than to get what you wanted. Except for this: Every now and then, when you are impossibly lucky you rise above yourself-and get both.

All my main characters are people I'd love to sit around having coffee with. They are people who will tell you honestly about the things that scare them and worry them and trouble them. Because those moments of connection between women-when they really decide to be honest with each other about their lives-are some of the best things in life.

It's vital to learn how to make the best of things.

You don't have to be perfect to be awesome.

Choosing to love - despite all the ways that people let you down, and disappear, and break your heart. Knowing everything we know about how hard life is and choosing to love, anyway.. That's not weakness, that's courage.

Good things didn't last, people hurt each other every day, and nobody got a happy ending. But that night with him made me see it all in a new way. All the hardships and insults and disappointments in life didn't make this one blissful moment less important. They made it more. They made it matter. The very fact that it couldn't last was the reason to hold on to it - however we could. Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn't to never feel hope, or bliss, or love - but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came. The answer wasn't to never love anyone. It was to love like crazy whenever you could.

Be brave with your life, so others will be brave with theirs.

We are big composters. We compost everything - bread, tea bags, coffee grounds. I even dump out my old coffee in the garden. We keep a mixing bowl on the counter and just fill it up as the day goes along, then dump it in the mulch pile before dinner and wash it with the dinner dishes.

Isn't there enough misery in the world? Do I really have to spend my leisure time absorbing more of it?

And I was grateful. For all the things that had brought me to this moment, and for every single thing that would follow.

It just seems to me there's enough pain in the world - and not nearly enough pleasure. I guess once you've had enough kidney stones, hot candle wax on the nipples seems less appealing.

It's amazing how brave you can be when you feel safe.

Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn't to never feel hope, or bliss, or love-but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came.

We had both moved on. We could both be okay at the same time. We weren't on a seesaw, for Pete's sake! There was plenty of okay to go around.

And here, after all that, is what I have come to believe about beauty: Laughter is beautiful. Kindness is beautiful. Cellulite is beautiful. Softness and plumpness and roundness are beautiful. It's more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous, than to sit pretty for pictures. A woman's soft tummy is a miracle of nature. Beauty comes from tenderness. Beauty comes from variety, from specificity, from the fact that no person in the world looks exactly like anyone else. Beauty comes from the tragedy that each person's life is destined to be lost to time. I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart - and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love. I have trained my eyes to look for beauty, and I've gotten very good at finding it. You can argue and tell me it's not true, but I really don't care what anyone says. I have come, at last, to believe in the title I came up with for the book: Everyone Is Beautiful.

Anything was possible. Everything was uncertain. But I knew one thing for sure: I'd bounced back before, and I would do it again and again and again. Because that's the only choice there is. And as many things as I still had to lose, I had just as many more left to find.

It's more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous than to sit pretty for pictures.

Ten years I'd simmered in my own self-righteousness, holding my grudge against her as if the only way to win was to stay mad the longest.

We build our lives in moments, and even the ones we can't remember become the story of who we are.

I had told my story. I had put it into words, at last... Telling the story changed the story for me. Not what had happened--that I could never change--but how I responded to it.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.