Kate Kennedy > Quotes

“Why would I ever let someone who drafts make-believe football teams make me believe I should be embarrassed by my interests?”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“Social anxiety is like believing in conspiracy theories about yourself.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“Now, you curate a photo or two for the whole evening, but back then, your friends would mass-upload every goddamn photo like it was a makeshift animated flip-book of the night’s least notable details. Social media wasn’t the highlight reel it is today; it was more like bad ongoing CCTV footage captioned with inside jokes.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“Even the phrase we are ridiculed for, “live, laugh, love,” fits into the criteria of literal retail therapy, where we would wear it and hang it all around us to be reminded of how to feel good. When you think about how widely ridiculed that phrase is, it almost makes you forget how it represents three of the most standard and important verbs of our existence: to be alive, to enjoy oneself, to love or be loved. What people forget about the commercialization of the phrase is that it peaked between 2008 and 2012, the era when many millennials postrecession were left picking up the pieces of the world we grew up expecting to inherit imploding before our eyes. We weren’t educated enough to diagnose our own depression in a financial one, so sue us for doubling down on whimsical driftwood decor. Therapy for us at the time was painted makeshift traffic signs in our homes reminding us to experience three basic human emotions.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“Pregnancy loss...is an open wound with the most vulnerable scab, forced to constantly replenish its surface-level protection as it's picked at daily, not by you, but inadvertently by other people's joy.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“To this day, I find it remarkable that anyone can eat, sleep, or, like, breathe knowing someone else is mad at them.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“But that’s the thing about girlhood. You and your friends have to take yourselves seriously, because no one else will.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“five different love languages: quality time, the giving of gifts, acts of service, physical touch, or words of encouragement.”
― Kate Kennedy, How to Light Up a Room: 55 Techniques to Help You Increase Your Charisma, Build Rapport, and Make People Like You

“To this day, I struggle to reconcile how you can have fun times in your life but not at all be having the time of your life.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“when an experience on-screen is being represented that a viewer self-identifies with, they are more likely to cite its inaccuracy. However, when an experience or community is being represented that’s outside of the viewer’s identity, they are more likely to perceive it as being accurate.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“And I have a pulse and grew up in the nineties, so of course, I've always glamorized lifeguard culture.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“I always hear people say, "If it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no," but I'm not blessed with this level of decisiveness. Or enthusiasm, for that matter. Even wedding dress shopping for me was like, "Say 'I guess' to the dress.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“I’ve watched perfectly normal decisions be cherry-picked for scrutiny, as long as it serves a narrative that reinforces our behavior as self-absorbed, easily distracted, noncommittal, and basement-dwelling. Honestly, joke’s on them; as a true-to-form nonhomeowning millennial, I don’t even find that trope insulting. All I’m thinking is, Damn, your parents have a basement?! That’s awesome.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“When our parents told us we could be anything we wanted, it was within the confines of what reality looked like in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, but the rules changed.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“It doesn't matter what they take away from you, they can never take the culture you have in your head.

[Alfons Lasker, d 1942]”
― Kate Kennedy, Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound

“I think I speak on behalf of many American Girls when I say that as a kid, I assumed the ultimate status symbol of wealth was a canopy bed. I grew up circling Felicity’s red-checkered linens to remind Santa that my collection would forever feel incomplete without a proper Colonial bedchamber.”
― Kate Kennedy

“Somewhere in between the pursuit of passion and the desire for respect and stability, you’ll likely find a lost millennial, recently hit square in the head with thoughts about how they were raised to feel like one in a million, who never thought in a million years they’d find themselves here, in many ways, back at square one”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“Silence is a collective abbreviation for a whole array of musical absences: the absence of sound, sounds never made, the absence of those who should have made them, sounds too quiet to be heard, sounds delayed or postponed indefinitely. Silence is the opposite of music, but it is also its lifeblood -- the breaths between the phrases, the drama, the anticipation, and the quality of the breathless hush between final note and applause. Music embraces calm silences, pregnant silences, animated or aggressive silences. Musical silence can be temporal, gestural, or spatial. In some cases, such as John Cage's famously curated silence, '4 Minutes 33 Seconds,' silence even -becomes- music. Without sound there cannot be silence, and vice versa.”
― Kate Kennedy, Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound

“I had to do everything in my power to not be myself in this era, because the only way to get a guy according to my sources (friends and YM magazine) was to play hard to get and I was, como se dice, very easy to g”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“I am glad I stayed out of trouble, but I am not sure I needed to be tricked into making good decisions. The impressionability of youth is one of the reasons I'm so hung up on this period of time in my life, because in many ways I feel robbed of the opportunity to nurture my own instincts prior to the interception of religious moralism by a handful of random adults who weren't even my parents or trusted mentors...”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“It's not just about wanting a kid - more importantly, I want to be a parent, to raise a decent human, and to provide for them what my parents gave me. To me, that's what matters more than baby fever. At least I hope. And maybe it wouldn't hurt to have someone young and fun to go to brunch with when I'm old.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“I genuinely think so few things we do are a waste of time; it's what you do with it that counts.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“I've discovered that members of my generation want to seize the opportunity to pursue passion over a predictable profession, but are torn between the traditional values they held growing up versus the modern opportunities that greeted them once they did. To me, this is the nucleus of the millennial paradox.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“As much as I wasn't sure if I wanted babies in general, something shifted when I wanted his. Not gonna lie; I am kind of curious about what a mini version of me could do with his bone structure and ability to do mental math.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“[A person] has as many souls as they have languages.

[Alfons Lasker, d1942]”
― Kate Kennedy, Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound

“That's the thing about girlhood. You and your friends have to take yourselves seriously, because no one else will. We had to keep our emotional behavior to diary pages and fangirl in private, performing at sleepovers on our trundle stages, because it felt like the rest of the world worked overtime to remind us that girlish things were inherently unserious.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“That's the thing about self-esteem; it's not about what's actually happening or how anybody objectively looks. It's about how you feel, and it's often a function of how you're treated by other people.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“I am convinced we liked Hocus Pocus so much because it was the only Disney movie that used the word "virgin," and hearing it in a context outside of Mary at church was a real thrill.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“When life buries us under all its heartache and disappointment, think about a seed. It needs to be buried in order for it to grow. That's how the magic happens. But you have to have faith. Remember that. Patience and faith.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

“meaning if somebody asked me, “How many Fs do I give?” the answer would be all of them. About everything. Ever. All of the time. Friendship, feelings, fandoms, fitting in, feminism. In my bones, I don't know how not to care the most.”
― Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In