Catherine > Catherine's Quotes

“Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, Beth had read in Vanity Fair only that morning, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“William, Edmund, and Anna knew, somewhere deep in the place where we know things that we cannot say aloud, that they had never lived in the sort of home one reads about in stories - one of warmth and affection and certainty in the knowledge that someone believes you hung the moon.”
― Kate Albus, A Place to Hang the Moon

“Mrs. Müller’s eyes sparkled. “I believe it was the poet, Mr. Yeats, who said that the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper?”
― Kate Albus, A Place to Hang the Moon

“They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“The words you can’t find, you borrow.
We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
We are not quite novels.
The analogy he is looking for is almost there.
We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.
In the end, we are collected works.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it's not faith, right?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn't have. I wouldn't have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“It's amazing how brave you can be when you feel safe.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“And it's a girl. And you will love her more than you love yourself. And you'll disappoint her, too—and never live up to the standards you set for yourself. But don't worry. She'll be okay.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“I gave you Jake because you’re headstrong and accident prone, and he’s our medic and I trust him to patch you up. I gave you Jake because you’re the best map reader we’ve got, and he’s damn near blind. And I gave you Jake because you absolutely never believe in yourself—and he finds a way to believe in you every damn day.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“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.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“Getting what you want doesn't make you happy... Having doesn't make you happy: appreciating does; Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“After all, life will hand each one of us our fair share of despair and loss and suffering—and then some. That’s certain. But just as certain: It will also give us slices of chocolate cake, and sunny, seventy-two-degree days, and breezes that rustle the trees. Good things are so easy to overlook, but that doesn’t make them any less there.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“I'd always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.
But I was wrong.
Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost - it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.
- Florence Day”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“Your grandma- my mother- told me once that the wind is just the breath of everyone who came before us. All the people who've passed on, all the ones who've taken a breath-" And he took a breath himself, loud and dramatic, and exhaled. "They're still in the wind. And they'll always be in the wind, singing. Until the wind is gone. Do you hear them?”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“I just like love stories, I guess. I like the way they paint the world in this Technicolor dreamland, where the only rule you have to follow is a happily ever after.”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“Take responsibility for your own unhappiness. If you don’t love your life, change it.”
― Abby Jimenez, Worst Wingman Ever

“Because—and he still did not understand how people like his brothers could not see this—inside the pages of each and every book was a whole other world. He could disappear inside that world whenever he needed to—whenever he felt the outside world, and other people, pressing in on him—a pressure from social contact and expectations that was surely routine for everyone else, but affected him much more intensely and inexplicably.”
― Natalie Jenner, The Jane Austen Society

“It’s funny, what you’ll do for your kids but not for yourself.”
― Annabel Monaghan, Summer Romance

“And now I can never unknow the truest true thing - the intensity of the love you feel will match the intensity of its loss. This is practically physics.”
― Annabel Monaghan, Summer Romance

“It's a lot easier to work through other people's problems. I think I must be very attached to my own.”
― Annabel Monaghan, Summer Romance

“I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else's muse.
I am not a muse.
I am the somebody.
End of fucking story.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Ocean waves begin their journey thousands of miles out at sea. Their form, size, and shape come from the speed of prevailing winds in the atmosphere, the power of currents hidden beneath the sea, and their “long fetch”—the distance between a wave’s point of origin and its point of arrival… Events that seem to appear in the present from out of nowhere in actuality have a long history behind them. George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark Part One”
― Marjan Kamali, The Lion Women of Tehran

“How lovely it must be to be an age at which you wanted to add quarters rather than subtract decades.”
― Clare Pooley, How to Age Disgracefully

“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Dylan Thomas”
― Clare Pooley, How to Age Disgracefully

“She appeared to have jumped out of the frying pan of sexism and into the fire of ageism. The final frontier of isms.”
― Clare Pooley, How to Age Disgracefully