Top 160 Christina Baker Kline Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “All were given one chance to step into a happily ever after- or at least it must have seemed that way. But was it the prince who attracted them, or merely the opportunity to escape?”

— Christina Baker Kline

52. “When I think about what would make me happy, I am struck by how basic my desires are. I want to feel that I’m progressing through life; I want a meaningful relationship and an engaging career. I want to live in a place that feels like home. What I want is what everyone wants – so ordinary as to be cliched. Why is that so hard to find?”

— Christina Baker Kline

53. “Do you believe in fate?” I ask. “What’s that again?” “That everything is decided. You’re just – you know – living it out.”

— Christina Baker Kline

54. “Now and then I leaf through the small blue volume of Emily Dickinson poems that my teacher, Mrs. Crowley, pressed into my hand. I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort. It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn’t.”

— Christina Baker Kline

55. “Ever since I was a little girl I had wanted to be.”

— Christina Baker Kline

56. “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but you could never have a normal life, even if that’s what you thought you wanted. You and me, we’re not ’normal.”

— Christina Baker Kline

57. “The house must be a sanctuary.”

— Christina Baker Kline

58. “Now Molly takes the knife and pokes it through the tape of the box Vivian has chosen: 1929–1930. Vivian, sitting on a wooden chest, waits patiently. After opening the flaps, Molly lifts out a mustard-colored coat, and Vivian scowls. “Mercy sake,” she says. “I can’t believe I saved that coat. I always hated it.”

— Christina Baker Kline

59. “Every person you’ve ever cared about, and every place you’ve ever loved, is one of these shells. You’re the thread that ties them together,” she’d said, touching Mathinna’s cheek. “You carry the people and places you cherish with you. Remember that and you will never be lonely, child.”

— Christina Baker Kline

60. “This is like telling a person who has leapt off a cliff to be careful. I am already in midair.”

— Christina Baker Kline

61. “How did I go from being the maiden in a fairy tale to a wretched old maids so quickly? It happened almost without my realizing it...”

— Christina Baker Kline

62. “Overhead, several bare bulbs glow like tiny moons.”

— Christina Baker Kline

63. “I think of what Mamey told me long ago: there are many ways to love and be loved. Too bad it’s taken most of a lifetime for me to understand what that means.”

— Christina Baker Kline

64. “I know all too well how it is when the beautiful visions you’ve been fed don’t match up with reality.”

— Christina Baker Kline

65. “Something inexorable seeds itself in the place of your origin. You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel.”

— Christina Baker Kline

66. “That’s the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they’ve been all along. – MADELEINE L’ENGLE, The Arm of the Starfish.”

— Christina Baker Kline

67. “A lady wants to feel pretty, no matter how much money she has.”

— Christina Baker Kline

68. “Maybe it doesn’t matter how much gets done. Maybe the value is in the process – in touching each item, in naming and identifying, in acknowledging the significance of a cardigan, a pair of children’s boots. “It’s.”

— Christina Baker Kline

69. “I... am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go.”

— Christina Baker Kline

70. “Wandering among the cardboard boxes, Vivian trails her fingertips across the tops of them, peering at their cryptic labels: The store, 1960–. The Nielsens. Valuables. “I suppose this is why people have children, isn’t it?” she muses. “So somebody will care about the stuff they leave behind.”

— Christina Baker Kline

71. “The time wasted, the energy squandered on meaningless possessions, the compromises...”

— Christina Baker Kline

72. “I want to say, Christina, that you are... unusual. And somehow... ” her voice trails off. “Your mind – your curiosity – will be your comfort.”

— Christina Baker Kline

73. “Though I lived with this man for my entire life, I never really knew him. He was like a frozen bay himself, I think – an icy crust, layers deep, above roiling water.”

— Christina Baker Kline

74. “These women are a little afraid of Mrs. Murphy, I can see. Over the course of dinner I notice that she can be snappish and short-tempered, and she likes to be the boss. When one of them expresses an opinion she disagrees with, she looks around at the group and gathers allies for her position. But she is nothing but kind to me.”

— Christina Baker Kline

75. “I am the only one of my siblings with red hair. When I asked my da where I got it, he joked that there must’ve been rust in the pipes. His own hair was dark – “cured,” he said, through years of toil – but when he was young it was more like auburn. Nothing like yours, he said. Your hair is as vivid as a Kinvara sunset, autumn leaves, the Koi goldfish in the window of that hotel in Galway. Mr. Grote doesn’t.”

— Christina Baker Kline

76. “If you really want to know me, I said, we’ll have to start with the witches.”

— Christina Baker Kline

77. “This is why we can’t leave the making of laws to men. They result in travesties of injustice that unfairly burden the poor. And women. Those high and mighty aristocrats, in their black robes and powdered wigs – they have no idea.”

— Christina Baker Kline

78. “Whether your journey is long or short, He will help you as long as you place your trust in Him.”

— Christina Baker Kline

79. “See the interlaced strands?′ She touched the raised pattern with a knobby finger. ‘These trace a never-ending path, leading away from home and circling back. When you wear this, you’ll never be far from the place you started.”

— Christina Baker Kline

80. “I’d say ye can’t know what code ye live by until it’s tested.”

— Christina Baker Kline

81. “I feel a joy so strong it’s almost painful – a knife’s edge of joy.”

— Christina Baker Kline

82. “The next morning Sadie helps me into her cream-colored Packard sedan.”

— Christina Baker Kline

83. “All those children sent on trains to the Midwest – collected off the streets of New York like refuse, garbage on a barge, to be sent as far away as possible, out of sight.”

— Christina Baker Kline

84. “There are many ways to be crippled, I’ve learned over the years, many forms of paralysis.”

— Christina Baker Kline

85. “Fairy tales end happily ever after because children crave certainly and resolution; they need to know how things turn out. But if my experiences in the past three months have shown me anything, it’s that I am comfortable living with more questions than answers. My own story will always be a work in progress.”

— Christina Baker Kline

86. “Las cosas que importan se quedan contigo, se filtran en tu piel.”

— Christina Baker Kline

87. “And even if she loses the charms, she thinks, they’ll always be a part of her. The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin. People get tattoos to have a permanent reminder of things they love or believe or fear, but though she’ll never regret the turtle, she has no need to ink her flesh again to remember the past. She had not known the markings would be etched so deep.”

— Christina Baker Kline

88. “It feels as if my life is moving forward at two separate speeds, one at the usual pace, with its predictable rhythms and familiar inhabitants, and the other rushing ahead, a blur of color and sound and sensation. It’s clear to me now that for twenty years I have gone through the motions of each day like a dumb animal, neither daring to hope for a different kind of life nor even knowing enough to desire one.”

— Christina Baker Kline

89. “The reading part of her feels private, between her and the characters in a book.”

— Christina Baker Kline

90. “I am acutely aware that like a slip of paper in the wind, something in his nature eludes my grasp.”

— Christina Baker Kline

91. “What’s the best thing that happened to you in the past ten years?” I ask. “Seeing you again.” Smiling, I push back against his chest. “Besides that.” “Meeting you the first time.”

— Christina Baker Kline

92. “If you’re disorganized, you risk losing everything.”

— Christina Baker Kline

93. “Something in his manner makes me want to confide things to him I’ve never told anyone. Even painful things, shameful things. I didn’t know how badly I wanted to share them.”

— Christina Baker Kline

94. “All of them fused together to give the tree its solid core. Maybe humans are like that, she thought. Maybe the moments that meant something to you and the people you’ve loved over the years are the rings. Maybe what you thought you’d lost is still there, inside of you, giving you strength.”

— Christina Baker Kline

95. “He squints at me. “Except for the red hair and freckles, you look okay. You’ll be fine and dandy sitting at the table with a napkin on your lap.”

— Christina Baker Kline

96. “You’re not shy. You just like who you like.”

— Christina Baker Kline

97. “The child you select is yours for free,” he adds, “on a ninety-day trial. At which point, if you so choose, you may send him back.”

— Christina Baker Kline

98. “Do our natures dictate the choices we make, I wonder, or do we choose to live a certain way because of circumstances beyond our control? Perhaps these questions are impossible to tease apart because, like a tangle of seaweed on a rock, they are connected at the root.”

— Christina Baker Kline

99. “Molly is suddenly struck by the fact that Vivian wrote these words on this sheet of paper more than eighty years ago. Upright and do right make all right.”

— Christina Baker Kline

100. “It’s hard to say what’s in my head. It’s been a long time since anyone cared to ask.”

— Christina Baker Kline