Catherine McKenzie > Quotes

“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.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Forgotten

“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.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Spin

“You don't want to work to fall in love, you want to be in love. Like in a fairy tale.”
― Catherine McKenzie

“They say that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian rain forest, it can change the weather half a world away. Chaos theory. What it means is that everything that happens in this moment is an accumulation of everything that’s come before it. Every breath. Every thought. There is no innocent action. Some actions end up having the force of a tempest. Their impact cannot be missed. Others are the blink of an eye. Passing by unnoticed. Perhaps only God knows which is which.

All I know today is that you can think that what you’ve done is only the flap of a butterfly wing, when it’s really a thunderclap. And both can result in a hurricane.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Fractured

“It seemed like almost nothing had happened, but that almost nothing changed everything for me.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Forgotten

“Is there a panic button I can hit? Or better yet, a button that will pause this whole scene while I figure out how I want to play it?
But no. That's not how it works in real life.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Forgotten

“Everyone’s path to here is unique, Anne. It’s what you do from here that counts.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Arranged

“If someone figured out a way to bottle woman-been-wronged, they’d make a fortune.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Arranged

“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.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“One minute doesn’t erase a thousand.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“That I’d been letting life act itself out on me when I should have been directing it.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“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.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“His mouth tastes like Scotch, and feels familiar, like somewhere I've been before.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Forgotten

“It’s hard to find someone you’d rather spend time with than not.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“Some people are meant to disappear from your life, to remain a memory, a faded possibility. A curiosity. I ought to know. But when curiosity is so easily fulfilled, how do you avoid fulfilling it? A button is pressed and you’re friends again.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“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.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“I don’t think that bad actions erase good ones. Not really.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“Depression’s a funny thing. We don’t know what to do about it—as a society—unless we’ve been there ourselves. The person before us is not someone we know, and their unhappiness is often not something we can understand. So we downplay it, and we make the afflicted somehow to blame. No one would ever tell someone with cancer that if they tried a bit harder, if they got out of bed and took a shower, everything would be better, but people told her all those things. That and more, worse.”
― Catherine McKenzie, The Good Liar

“And while I got that about him, he never seemed to understand or believe it when I told him I wasn't like that. That I was happy to coast. To drift and summersault like a dried-out leaf in the late fall, hoping to avoid the rake, the collecting pile, the compost heap.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“We all wear a mask. The trick is keeping it in place.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Fractured

“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.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Spin

“And why do the main characters always have to hate each other at the beginning of the movie? Like, hello, red flag. It’s so obvious they’re going to get together.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“But, of course, everyone has regrets. Loose ends. Things they could do if they had more time.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“All I knew was I had to talk to someone. I had to try to steal someone’s rationality.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“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.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“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.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“No one had told her, before she had children, that being a mother would be like reliving her own childhood, only worse. That she’d have to re-feel all the slights and worries a hundredfold.”
― Catherine McKenzie, The Good Liar

“Ah, the Serenity Prayer. “God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can . . .” For some reason, reciting it never leaves me feeling very serene.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Spin

“My brain was playing tricks on me, sucking me inward, away from my life, my family, myself.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Hidden

“Life doesn’t wait. You have to make it happen. You have to live it while it’s happening around you. Life moves on.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Forgotten