Top 160 Christina Baker Kline Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Test your limits. Learn what you can endure.”

— Christina Baker Kline

2. “I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best, and we should all just be kind to each other.”

— Christina Baker Kline

3. “It is good to test your limits now and then, learn what the body is capable of, what you can endure.”

— Christina Baker Kline

4. “So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason – to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?”

— Christina Baker Kline

5. “You got to learn to take what people are willing to give.”

— Christina Baker Kline

6. “It’s painful to hold out hope for the things that once brought you joy. You have to find ways to make yourself forget.”

— Christina Baker Kline

7. “I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over and over again.”

— Christina Baker Kline

8. “It’s human nature to want to think the best of others, but if you listen carefully, people will always tell you who they are.”

— Christina Baker Kline

9. “The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance.”

— Christina Baker Kline

10. “And so it is that you learn how to pass, if you’re lucky, to look like everyone else, even though you’re broken inside.”

— Christina Baker Kline

11. “I’ve come to think that’s what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.”

— Christina Baker Kline

12. “Angel’s trumpet. Beautiful, in’it? Eating these flowers makes your troubles go away. Problem is, too much will kill ye.” She laughed. “It got its name because it’s the last thing you’ll see before ascending into heaven.”

— Christina Baker Kline

13. “We both start laughing – at the absurdity of our shared experience, the relief of recognition. We cling to each other like survivors of a shipwreck, astonished that neither of us drowned.”

— Christina Baker Kline

14. “Time constricts and flattens, you know. It’s not evenly weighted. Certain moments linger in the mind and others disappear.”

— Christina Baker Kline

15. “I know too much; I’ve seen people at their worst, at their most desperate and selfish, and this knowledge makes me wary. So I am learning to pretend, to smile, to nod, to display empathy I do not feel. I am learning to pass, to look like everyone else, even though I feel broken inside.”

— Christina Baker Kline

16. “If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead.”

— Christina Baker Kline

17. “Upright and do right make all right.”

— Christina Baker Kline

18. “Time constricts and flattens, you know. It’s not evenly weighted. Certain moments linger in the mind and others disappear. The first twenty-three years of my life are the ones that shaped me, and the fact that I’ve lived almost seven decades since then is irrelevant.”

— Christina Baker Kline

19. “So I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display empathy I do not feel. I am learning to pass, to look like everyone else, even though I feel broken inside.”

— Christina Baker Kline

20. “She has learned that she can control her emotions by thinking of her chest cavity as an enormous box with a chain lock. She opens the box and stuffs in any stray unmanageable feelings, any wayward sadness or regret, and clamps it shut.”

— Christina Baker Kline

21. “When Vivian describes how it felt to be at the mercy of strangers, Molly nods. She knows full well what it’s like to tamp down your natural inclinations, to force a smile when you feel numb. After a while you don’t know what your own needs are anymore.”

— Christina Baker Kline

22. “I have been so alone on this journey, cut off from my past. However hard I try, I will always feel alien and strange. And now I’ve stumbled on a fellow outsider, one who speaks my language without saying a word.”

— Christina Baker Kline

23. “The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin.”

— Christina Baker Kline

24. “Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They’re passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.”

— Christina Baker Kline

25. “Sometime in the second week it becomes clear to Molly that “cleaning out the attic” means taking things out, fretting over them for a few minutes, and putting them back where they were, in a slightly neater stack. Out of the two dozen boxes she and Vivian have been through so far, only a short pile of musty books and some yellowed linen have been deemed too ruined to keep. “I don’t think I’m helping you much,” Molly says. “Well, that’s true,” Vivian says. “But I’m helping you, aren’t I?”

— Christina Baker Kline

26. “I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable.”

— Christina Baker Kline

27. “Jeez Louise, this is why.”

— Christina Baker Kline

28. “In portaging from one river to another, Wabanakis had to carry their canoes and all other possessions. Everyone knew the value of traveling light and understood that it required leaving some things behind. Nothing encumbered movement more than fear, which was often the most difficult burden to surrender.”

— Christina Baker Kline

29. “I wonder, not for the first time, if shame and pride are merely two sides of the same coin.”

— Christina Baker Kline

30. “That man would have chipped away at your heart bit by bit until there was nothing left. It may have been bruised, but at least it’s whole.”

— Christina Baker Kline

31. “The bitterness and alcohol and depression are stripped away from these phantom incarnations, and they console and protect me in death as they never did in life. I’ve come to think that’s what heaven is – a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.”

— Christina Baker Kline

32. “Fanny gives me a long hug. She holds my face in her small cold hands. “You are a good girl, Niamh,” she says. “Don’t let anybody tell you different.”

— Christina Baker Kline

33. “Each moment of loss, she has come to believe, contains within it the possibility of a new life. When the unimaginable happens, and your life changes irrevocably, you may find along with the pain a kind of grace. And in the place of certainty and fear – the fear of losing what you had – you are left with something startling: a depth of empathy, a quivering sensitivity to the world around you, and the unexpected blessing of gratitude for what remains.”

— Christina Baker Kline

34. “The most important qualities a human can possess are an iron will and a persevering spirit,” Mamey.”

— Christina Baker Kline

35. “I think she’d prefer pancakes. Do you think she’d like blueberry pancakes? Who doesn’t like blueberry pancakes?”

— Christina Baker Kline

36. “What she wants most – what she truly yearns for – is what any of us want: to be seen.”

— Christina Baker Kline

37. “Dusk softens the sharp points of trees outside my window; the sky slowly darkens, then blackens around an orb of moon. Hours later, a faint blue tinge yields to the soft pastels of dawn, and soon enough sun is streaming in, the stop-start rhythm of the train making it all feel like still photography, thousands of images that taken together create a scene in motion.”

— Christina Baker Kline

38. “Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” Maybe so, I think. Maybe my memories of sweeter times are vivid enough, and present enough, to overcome the disappointments that followed. And to sustain me through the rest.”

— Christina Baker Kline

39. “If I am honest... I will say that I simply need a warm, dry place to live. I want enough food to eat, clothes, and shoes that will protect me from the cold. I want calmness and order. More than anything, I want to feel safe in my bed.”

— Christina Baker Kline

40. “It is a terrible thing to find the love of your life... You know too well what you’re missing when it’s gone.”

— Christina Baker Kline

41. “Jack would laugh if he knew, but she’s been in he system long enough to understand that it all comes down to documentation. Get your papers in order, with the right signatures and record keeping, and the charges will be dropped, money released, whatever. If you’re disorganized, you risk losing everything.”

— Christina Baker Kline

42. “To get it all done I have to dim my brain, turn it down by notches like the flat-turn knob on a gas lantern, leaving only a nub of flame.”

— Christina Baker Kline

43. “I can’t imagine why you didn’t memorize this route on the.”

— Christina Baker Kline

44. “I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display.”

— Christina Baker Kline

45. “She is so white-hot furious she can barely see. She stokes the fire of her hatred, feeding it tidbits about bigoted Dina and spineless mushmouth Ralph, because she knows that just beyond the rage is a sorrow so enervating it could render her immobile. She needs to keep moving, flickering around the room. She needs o fill her bags and get the hell out of here.”

— Christina Baker Kline

46. “It’s a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past.”

— Christina Baker Kline

47. “This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting.”

— Christina Baker Kline

48. “But it kind of feels nice to nurture her resentment, to foster it. It’s something she can savor and control, this feeling of having been wronged by the world.”

— Christina Baker Kline

49. “We make the beet salad by steaming the beets until soft, about thirty minutes, plunging into cold water, and removing the skins. After cutting the beets into small cubes, we toss them with a vinaigrette of orange juice, vinegar, olive oil, and shallots, adding crumbles of goat cheese and green onion, for color and taste and crunch, at the end.”

— Christina Baker Kline

50. “People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find...”

— Christina Baker Kline