Kate Christensen > Quotes

“Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.”
― Kate Christensen, The Astral

“My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.”
― Kate Christensen, The Astral

“It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.”
― Kate Christensen, The Astral

“Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.”
― Kate Christensen

“I take another deep inhale, enough air to contain the words I need these people to hear. “My sister has devoted her entire life, all her beauty and grace and charm, to the well-being of you three lucky people. But you need to understand something. No one taught her how to do this. She had to do it all from scratch. She came from the most neglected, deprived childhood you can imagine. Trust me, I know. We had none of this growing up.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency...”
― Kate Christensen, Trouble

“Sometimes we posit a scenario in which we were both young when we met, and we imagine that we would have had kids, if only because I would have wanted them. And we would have raised them with all our best efforts and unflagging commitment. But we also would have become different people, made different choices, and had a different relationship with each other; more distant and harried, more responsible, more grown-up. Instead, we have this life, and we are these people. We get to go to bed every night together, alone, and wake up together, alone. Our shared passions thrill and satisfy us, and our abundant freedoms—to daydream; to cook exactly the food we want when we want it; to drink wine and watch a movie without worrying about who’s not yet asleep upstairs; to pick up and go anywhere we want, anytime; to do our work uninterrupted; to shape our own days to our own liking; and to stay connected to each other without feeling fractured—are not things we’d choose to give up for anyone, ever.”
― Kate Christensen, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“I scrambled to pack my things, glad I owned so little.”
― Kate Christensen, The Astral

“Decency, the fundamental trustworthy drive to do what’s needed, what’s right and good for the world, a quality so ordinary and dull that it’s taken for granted, even mocked, until it’s in short supply. Like oxygen or water.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“Let nothing human be foreign to me”
― Kate Christensen, Trouble

“always impressed by my sister’s sangfroid in any situation,”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“both of us looking out over the light-streaked expanse, listening to the rushing quietude of the ebbing tide.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“They might as well be floating in outer space in life-support pods.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“And Dan, who had maintained all during our schism that we were both insane, welcomed me back as if nothing had ever happened, still his same warm, laconic, wry self.”
― Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites

“I worked at home, all by myself. Of course, I had Dingo, but a dog just doesn’t cut it in the blue hour.”
― Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites

“Kids’ lives are abstract, cerebral. There’s no cultural or political revolution, no upswell of anger. But there’s never been more to protest! Gosh, do I sound like an old crackpot.” She quoted in a high, self-righteous bleat, “‘When I was your age, I walked ten miles to school barefoot through the snow.”
― Kate Christensen, The Great Man

“enter his brain and body to become fused with his desire for me. I seek completion in his own pleasure and forget about my own.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I stand on the broad clifftop that overlooks the Fore River estuary, its industrial warehouses lit up below me, and, beyond it, the wooded glacial floodplain that stretches west toward the faint black shape of the White Mountains on the horizon. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry at the desperate absurdity of this world and my place in it.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I almost envy his impending freedom, and I dread my own upcoming grief as I’ve never dreaded anything before in my life. Of course I keep this to myself. I’m blunt, I know, but I do try not to be cruel.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I have always felt loneliest in the presence of other people. People I can't connect with. People I feel unseen by. People who make me feel insincere or uncomfortable. For me, loneliness comes from a sense of missing something. I never miss anything when I'm alone.”
― Kate Christensen

“Twenty years ago, this town was a backwater, a little provincial northern maritime outpost, isolated and gritty and rough, out of time. Now it seems to emanate a sharp electric hum, connected to the rest of the world, plugged into the motherboard, on the same frequency as everywhere else.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“...that old unfulfilled craving became an obsession I couldn't escape, a black hole of raw grief I kept falling deeper into. 'Where are my children?' I felt their absence and loss as if they existed somewhere I couldn't reach, as if they were stuck forever on the other side of a membrane and I could never access them.”
― Kate Christensen, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Eyes closed, I hang suspended in this calm, empty present, surrounded by docile strangers in a tube of metal zooming north through a clear sky.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I wanted to live in a clean, renovated Victorian house full of books, not a rough-hewn, unfinished industrial loft. I wanted to raise bright, good kids, to write bright, good novels in a quiet study, to cook wholesome meals and listen to Bach. He wanted to play loud amplified music, sleep late, drink tequila, and travel. It seemed to me that we didn’t want to be the people we’d married each other for.”
― Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites

“We were mortified by our mother back then. We did not appreciate her idiosyncratic dignity, her preening flamboyance, her dogged zest to experience life to the fullest.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“It’s disorienting to be suddenly inside, almost like walking into another person’s head, after being alone out in the wild woods all day.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“my buttons all pushed like an elevator with a six-year-old kid riding in it, and we would have gotten into something.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I get dressed and bolt some coffee and go out into the bright, sparkling day,”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I have always felt loneliest in the presence of other people—people I can’t connect with, people I feel unseen by, people who make me feel insincere or uncomfortable. For me, loneliness comes from a sense of missing something. I never miss anything when I’m alone.”
― Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites

“I needed a brief jaunt of freedom, briny air blowing through the open car window as I drove the short distance to and from the supermarket.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger