QUOTES

Here are some Katherine Center quotes gathered from around the web.

 

 

 

 

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.

Katherine Center

 

It’s hard work to make it look easy.

Katherine Center

 

 

 

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.

Katherine Center

 

 

 

Stories are play for grown-ups.

Katherine Center

 

Some of the greatest ideas we have come from making do.

Katherine Center

 

 

 

 

 

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

Katherine Center

 

 

 

 

Success is doing the right thing for who you are.

Katherine Center

 

My goal is to try to be as happy as I can — going through every day just as it is.

Katherine Center

 

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

Katherine Center

 

 

If you feel lucky, then you are.

Katherine Center

 

Look for the good stuff.

Katherine Center

 

 

 

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

Katherine Center

 

 

You can’t fix everything. Not even close. But you can look for reasons to be grateful. More than that, you can work to create them.

Katherine Center • How to Walk Away

 

 

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

Katherine Center • How to Walk Away

 

 

 

“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.”

Katherine Center • Nothing Worthwhile is Ever Easy

 

 

There is an entire universe of things my mother knows that I don’t.

Katherine Center • Things To Remember Not to Forget

 

We all carry our mothers inside us.

Katherine Center • Things to Remember Not to Forget

 

 

There is no tenderness without bravery.

Katherine Center • Get Lucky

 

 

 

 

People are always beautiful when you love them.

Katherine Center • Everyone Is Beautiful

 

 

 

It’s my battle cry: Appreciate Everything!

Katherine Center • Happiness for Beginners

 

 

 

 

 

When you don’t know what to do for yourself, do something for someone else.

Katherine Center • How to Walk Away

 

 

 

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

Katherine Center • Get Lucky

 

 

 

 

 

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

Katherine Center • Get Lucky

 

 

 

In some ways, if I’m honest, giving up felt good. Staying hopeful was exhausting.

Katherine Center • How to Walk Away

 

 

Beauty comes from tenderness.

Katherine Center • Everyone Is Beautiful

 

 

 

 

It’s always better to have what you have than to get what you wanted.

Katherine Center • Get Lucky

 

 

I suddenly understood what it was, exactly, people longed for when they longed for their youth.

Katherine Center • Everyone Is Beautiful

 

 

If you think of human emotions as music, then mine were like an orchestra with no conductor.

Katherine Center • How to Walk Away

 

 

The eyes see everything through the heart.

Katherine Center • Everyone Is Beautiful

 

 

When you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you.

Katherine Center • Everyone Is Beautiful

 

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

Katherine Center • Everyone Is Beautiful

 

 

“Here’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.”

Katherine Center • Get Lucky

 

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.

Katherine Center • Everyone Is Beautiful

 

 

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

Katherine Center • Things You Save in a Fire

 

 

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 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.

Katherine Center • Everyone Is Beautiful

 

 

 

You are writing the story of your only life every single minute of every day.

Katherine Center • What I Would Tell Her

 

 

Maybe the past is supposed to fade—and that’s actually a kindness of human memory.

Katherine Center • Things to Remember Not to Forget

 

You can’t know what you know now and feel the way you did then.

Katherine Center • Things to Remember Not to Forget

 

 

That’s what just hit me:  How you really can’t have everything.  You have to give up the old to get the new.  You can’t be the child and the mom at the same time.  You can’t be your young self and your old self at the same time.  You can’t know what you know now and feel the way you did then.  You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.

Katherine Center •Things to Remember Not to Forget

 

Our lives disappear, even as we live them.

Katherine Center

 

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

Katherine Center

 

The human race has a lot to answer for, and it’s not as easy to feel hopeful as it should be—but you make it more important to try.

Katherine Center

 

The way that I love you makes me a better person.

Katherine Center

The way that I love you makes me a better person, and the way that you love me back makes every sorrow worth it.

Katherine Center

 

 

And so my hope for you, good boy, as you grow taller every day, is that you will learn to take good care of yourself, and you will learn to take good care of others—and, someday, you’ll see how those two things are exactly the same.

Katherine Center

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

Katherine Center

Look for beauty in everything.

Katherine Center

 

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.

Katherine Center • Kirtsy Video

 

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.

Katherine Center •  Kirtsy Video

 

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.

Katherine Center • Things to Remember Not to Forget

 

I worry constantly about carpool and whether or not I’ve forgotten a carload of weeping children at the school gate.  How on earth does anyone do it?  How did she make it look so easy?  Or maybe time makes everything seem easy.  Or maybe I am really terrified that I’ll never become enough like her to keep her with me. I know that we all carry our mothers inside us.  But somehow that doesn’t seem like enough.

Katherine Center • Things to Remember Not to Forget

 

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What I Would Tell Her (If I Knew What To Say)

by Katherine Center

 

 

You are a miracle.

And I have to love you this fiercely:  So that you can feel it even after you leave for school, or even while you are asleep, or even after your childhood becomes a memory.

You’ll forget all this when you grow up.  But it’s okay.

Being a mother means having your heart broken.

And it means loving and losing and falling apart and coming back together.

And it’s the best there is.  And also, sometimes, the worst.

Sometimes you won’t have anyone to talk to.

Sometimes you’ll wonder if you’ve forgotten who you are.

But you must remember this:  What you’re doing matters.

And you have to be brave with your life so that others can be brave with theirs.

The truth is, being a woman is a gift.

Tenderness is a gift.

Intimacy is a gift.

And nurturing the good in this world is a nothing short of a privilege.

That’s why I have to love you this way.  So I can give what I have to you.  So that you can carry it in your body and pass it on.

I have watched you sleep.  I’ve kissed you a million times.  And I know something that you don’t, yet:

You are writing the story of your ONLY life every single minute of every day.

And my greatest hope for you, sweet child, is that I can teach you how to write a good one.