Top 60 Catherine Newman Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable. There is so much love inside of us. How do we become worthy of it? And, then, where does it go? A worldwide crescendo of grief, sustained day after day, and only one tiny note of it is mine.”

— Catherine Newman

2. “Marriage confused me. Some days it seemed to be just an endless sequence of body functions: the fan turned on in the smelly bathroom; the sound of someone clipping their toenails into the trash can; a waxy Q-tip on the counter; a scrim of shaved-off hairs around the sink. Another person’s waste sloughing off incessantly! It can really drain a person of the will to live.”

— Catherine Newman

3. “What it is like to be any parent. The way you ache when they ache, the way you experience their stomachaches or heartaches or fear in your very self. It’s as if, having once been placentally connected to your beating heart, having once inhabited your actual body, your children continue to live there with you. For better and worse, you are never alone again. Parental love defies your apartness from another person.”

— Catherine Newman

4. “One thing I’ve started to suspect about myself is that I’m some kind of confusingly extroverted introvert. I just want to sit here on the couch with a tumblerful of the good booze Alice brought, soak in the music and the conversation, and not talk to anyone. I want to be invisible and lie down on the couch and fall asleep to the muffled sounds of conversation, like a child in the back seat of the car being driven safely through the night by grown-ups who love her.”

— Catherine Newman

5. “Every year, ever since the girls were born, I have blown out the candles on my birthday cake and wished for just this. Everything I have already. No loss. I can’t spare anybody is what I always think. But, then, people must be spared. That is the whole premise of this life, of this time we have with each other.”

— Catherine Newman

6. “We were trying to understand, then, what her life was about to become. I think we’re still trying to understand.”

— Catherine Newman

7. “Everything you’ve ever fed him,” I say. “His whole self is made completely out of your love.”

— Catherine Newman

8. “What I’m starting to understand, finally, is that the point isn’t to help the people who know how best to ask for help. It’s to be helpful.”

— Catherine Newman

9. “I try to stay vigilant because everybody’s health and safety depends on it, and also, if I relax now I will fall asleep for the entire rest of my life and wake up dead.”

— Catherine Newman

10. “It’s up to me now, to unravel this rope I’ve twisted together from shame and guilt and rage and sadness.”

— Catherine Newman

11. “It’s the anticipation I can’t handle. Loss lurks around every corner, and how do we prepare?”

— Catherine Newman

12. “They say that having a child is like agreeing to let your heart walk around outside your body. But really your heart escapes from your body directly into the jaws of a lion. It’s nothing you would ever agree to.”

— Catherine Newman

13. “Menopause feels like a slow leak: thoughts leaking out of your head; flesh leaking out of your skin; fluid leaking out of your joints. You need a lube job, is how you feel. Bodywork. Whatever you need, it sounds like a mechanic might be required, since something is seriously amiss with your head gasket.”

— Catherine Newman

14. “This day contains multitudes. Maybe every day does.”

— Catherine Newman

15. “You’re supposed to retrace your steps when you lose something, but none of my losses are like that. Where would I look for them? And what would I do if I found them? Little ghost babies, born babies, outgrown children’s bodies, missing teenagers. Loss like a shipwreck. Swim down to it, down, down, down to the pitch-black ocean floor, where nothing is visible and it never dissolves.”

— Catherine Newman

16. “Who wants a guy to last longer? Finish up is my feeling. My library book’s not going to read itself!”

— Catherine Newman

17. “What does loss look like, in your body? Where is it? It feels like an air bubble stuck in your psyche. It feels like peering down into a deep hole. The vertigo of that. The potential for obliteration. It’s in your stomach. Your spleen. Or it’s just your heart losing its mind.”

— Catherine Newman

18. “I mean you’re never done being somebody’s mom, ever, are you?”

— Catherine Newman

19. “Nick and I both scrambled through our children’s childhoods, half-assing work, half-assing home.”

— Catherine Newman

20. “I love you, but you want impossible things, Ash,” he said, finally, and it was true. It still is. I want impossible things.”

— Catherine Newman

21. “But share everything that matters. And keep loving each other massively.”

— Catherine Newman

22. “She waited to die until I left the room, which is a thing I’ve heard parents do. I can imagine it. I mean, you’re never done being somebody’s mom, ever, are you? She took care of me until the very end.”

— Catherine Newman

23. “I would pick this life too, I know. I’d even pick the way that pain has burnished me to brightness. The pain itself, though? I imagine I’d give it up if I could.”

— Catherine Newman

24. “Fly, be free! I want to say. I want to say, Stay with me forever! Come to think of it, these are the two things I want to say to everyone I love most.”

— Catherine Newman

25. “Mom, try not to hurt your own feelings for no reason,” Willa says. This is sensible advice.”

— Catherine Newman

26. “Hey, Mama?” This is Willa, gentle. “This is a lot. It’s so, so much. But I wonder if you want to shift gears? Grandpa is telling you something about – about himself, really. More than he’s telling you something about you, I think.” “Thanks, honey,” I say, and Jamie smiles, says, “Did you just low-key roast Mama for being a narcissist?” I love these kids more every day.”

— Catherine Newman

27. “I’m so in love with her that if we were marsupials, I’d be stuffing her grown self back into my pouch.”

— Catherine Newman

28. “The children become the adults. It’s too beautiful to bear – and too much to be worthy of.”

— Catherine Newman

29. “It’s monstrous. It is too much to take. Why do we even do this – love anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.”

— Catherine Newman

30. “He’s just wrong,” Nick says now. “He’s imperfect. This is not new information. It’s okay. You still get to love him.”

— Catherine Newman

31. “How alive your heart to feel such sorrow!”

— Catherine Newman

32. “Activities that might injure you include ping-pong, napping, and opening a tub of Greek yogurt.”

— Catherine Newman

33. “The children’s features shattered me a little bit – as if someone had siphoned love out of me and tattooed it onto someone else’s face.”

— Catherine Newman

34. “Why do we love everyone so recklessly and then break our own hearts? And they don’t even break. They just swell, impossibly, with more love.”

— Catherine Newman

35. “Leave it, I think to myself, like I’m a dog with something in its jaws: a squirrel, a frankfurter, a pair of underpants, a grief habit. Leave it.”

— Catherine Newman

36. “I used to picture time as a rope you followed along, hand over hand, into the distance, but it’s nothing like that. It moves outward but holds everything that’s come before. Cut me open and I’m a tree trunk, rings of nostalgia radiating inward. All the years are nested inside me like I’m my own personal one-woman matryoshka doll. I guess that’s true for everybody, but then I drive everybody crazy with my nostalgia and happiness. I am bittersweet personified.”

— Catherine Newman

37. “I have had many ideas about myself – and many of them have been ruined. I do not share this thought with my daughter.”

— Catherine Newman

38. “We call this style of childhood nostalgia the catalogue of grievances. “Oooh, are we reminiscing about Mama’s failures?” Nick says cheerfully. He has walked over to join us. “Just that one,” Willa says. “Unless I think of others.”

— Catherine Newman

39. “Inside the hospice, Belle glows like a shiny ambassador from the land of youth. It feels almost indecent to bring her.”

— Catherine Newman

40. “But I did. I’m just a person. That’s part of choice – we get to make our own decisions, even if they’re imperfect. The potential that you might regret something? We don’t make anything illegal because of that.”

— Catherine Newman

41. “But grief was like a silver locket with two faces in it. I didn’t know what the faces looked like, but it was heavy around my neck, and I never took it off.”

— Catherine Newman

42. “And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.”

— Catherine Newman

43. “Sunglasses and sunscreen and sandy feet pressed against her thighs and stomach. Little children running across the sand with their little pails. Her own parents laughing in their beach chairs, shrinking inside their clothes as the years pass. Grief bright in the periphery, like a light flashing just out of view.”

— Catherine Newman

44. “I’ve heard grief described as love with nowhere to go.”

— Catherine Newman

45. “I just mean that Edith doesn’t want to die – she’s not fully at peace with the idea – so she might not come to anything that feels satisfying. She might not make meaning of her life and death. She might, of course. I mean, we always hope for that because it makes us feel better. But she might not.”

— Catherine Newman

46. “We call this style of childhood nostalgia the catalogue of grievances.”

— Catherine Newman

47. “Could we just not? I just saw an ad for men who want to last longer. Who wants a guy to last longer? Finish up is my feeling. My library book’s not going to read itself!”

— Catherine Newman

48. “And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same. To say, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, a kid. To say, Your shell stank and you’re sad. I’ve been there.”

— Catherine Newman

49. “When I’m jealous of my parents, I think: It was easier then. My worked; my mom stayed home. There was absolute clarity. Now there’s just pretend equity, and it’s not very romantic.”

— Catherine Newman

50. “There are so many ways to lose our children, and I have imagined most of them.”

— Catherine Newman