Top 160 Christina Baker Kline Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The truth is, when I’m immersed in a book I’m less aware of the pain in my unpredictable arms and legs.”

— Christina Baker Kline

102. “And anyway, how do you talk about losing everything?”

— Christina Baker Kline

103. “If you going to steal a book thought, you should at least take the nicest one, otherwise what’s the point?”

— Christina Baker Kline

104. “I did love him. But I did not love him like I loved Dutchy: beyond reason. Maybe you only get one of those in a lifetime, I don’t know. But it was all right. It was enough.”

— Christina Baker Kline

105. “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?”

— Christina Baker Kline

106. “When I shut my eyes in the warm bath, I feel as if I’m floating inside a cloud.”

— Christina Baker Kline

107. “A trick to play in your mind when your troubled. You think of yourself as a tree, with all the rings inside. And every ring is someone you care about, or a place you’ve been. You carry them with you wherever you go.”

— Christina Baker Kline

108. “Yes, Evangeline loathed this place, but she loathed more the vanity and naivete and willful ignorance that had landed her here.”

— Christina Baker Kline

109. “I am ninety-one years old, and almost everyone who was once in my life is now a ghost. Sometimes these.”

— Christina Baker Kline

110. “This girl may never go anywhere. She should at least know that adventure is in her bones.” When.”

— Christina Baker Kline

111. “It’s as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn’t – which, of course, is pretty often – she is surprised and affronted.”

— Christina Baker Kline

112. “I’m one of few children on the train who can read. Mam taught me all my letters years ago, in Ireland, then taught me how to spell. When we got to New York, she’d make me read to her, anything with words on it – crates and bottles I found in the street.”

— Christina Baker Kline

113. “Actually, I did it because when we lived on Indian Island we had this turtle named Shelly.”

— Christina Baker Kline

114. “Her father wanted to insulate her, to shelter her from harm, and in doing so he denied her the inoculation required to survive.”

— Christina Baker Kline

115. “Girls from my graduating class come into the store brandishing solitaire diamonds like Legion of Honor medals, as if they’ve accomplished something significant – which I guess they think they have, though all I can see is a future of washing some man’s clothes stretching ahead of them.”

— Christina Baker Kline

116. “Mathinna remembered what her mother had said about thinking of yourself as the thread of a necklace, the people and places you treasure as the shells. Maybe Wanganip and Hazel were saying the same thing: that if you love something it stays with you, even after it’s gone.”

— Christina Baker Kline

117. “I sit on a rock, watching her. She seems better, I think. But now and then I see her staring off into the distance with a blank expression on her face, and it worries me.”

— Christina Baker Kline

118. “You must also keep your faith in God to guide you forward if the way is not clear. Whether the journey is long or short, He will help you as long as you place your trust in Him.”

— Christina Baker Kline

119. “You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it’ll become too small.” “Then.”

— Christina Baker Kline

120. “All at once I am so tired of this-of the constant threat of humiliation and pain, the fear of exposure, of trying to act like I’m normal when I’m not- that I burst into tears. No, I am not all right, I want to say. I am fouled, degraded, ashamed, a burden and an embarrassment.”

— Christina Baker Kline

121. “She stayed as quiet as she could. This, she found, was the trick: you didn’t have to react to each little thing. You could just exist. Let your mind simmer over a low fire.”

— Christina Baker Kline

122. “From the recesses of my brain a word floats up: synecdoche. A part that stands in for the whole. Christina’s World.”

— Christina Baker Kline

123. “I wonder what those stars are meant to represent. They must be proof that you are especially worthy, that you shine a little brighter than everyone else. But if you wake with the blessed in heaven, isn’t that enough? Haven’t you achieved the most you could’ve hoped for? The.”

— Christina Baker Kline

124. “You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel. And the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before.”

— Christina Baker Kline

125. “I like to be busy,” she says. “And useful. I think those are pretty basic human desires – don’t you?”

— Christina Baker Kline

126. “It’s a bitter nostalgia from a moment not yet passed.”

— Christina Baker Kline

127. “She felt her fear unspooling like a tight fist opening. It was as if she’d been standing on a precipice and suddenly tipped forward. There was no point in feeling afraid. She was already falling, falling through the air, and her future, whatever it held, was rushing up to meet her.”

— Christina Baker Kline

128. “A store-bought trinket with no history, no story. I knew, deep down, when he gave it to me that he didn’t understand anything about me.”

— Christina Baker Kline

129. “And eventually-though neither of us knew it yet-we’d end up here, in this place, within and without the world of the painting.”

— Christina Baker Kline

130. “The hands clasped together symbolize friendship. The heart is love. And the crown stands for loyalty.”

— Christina Baker Kline

131. “I think about the destructiveness of desire: of wanting something unrealistic, of believing in the possibility of rescue. This stint in Boston only confirms my belief that there is no cure for what ails me. No matter how long I hold a stick with fluttering rags above my head, no trawler in the distance will be coming to my rescue.”

— Christina Baker Kline

132. “And if I’m honest, there’s something else. Gertrude has become a stand-in for anyone who ever pitied me, didn’t try to understand me, abandoned me. She gives my bitterness a place to dwell.”

— Christina Baker Kline

133. “Sometimes you don’t look for perfect. Sometimes enough is the most you can hope for.”

— Christina Baker Kline

134. “We sit in silence, the air between bristling with words unsaid.”

— Christina Baker Kline

135. “When the breakfast dishes are cleared, she starts on the large midday meal: chicken pie or pot roast or fish stew; mashed or boiled potatoes; peas or carrots, fresh or canned, depending on the season. What’s left over reappears at supper, transformed into a casserole or a stew. Mother.”

— Christina Baker Kline

136. “People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn’t. Not really. He wasn’t even in the field; he conjured it from a room in the house, an entirely different angle. He removed rocks and trees and outbuildings. The scale of the barn is wrong. And I am not that frail young thing, but a middle-aged spinster. It’s not my body, really, and maybe not even my head. He.”

— Christina Baker Kline

137. “She says she can’t believe she raised a child who traveled all over the world but has been content ever since to let the world come to her.”

— Christina Baker Kline

138. “It reminds me of The House of the Seven Gables.”

— Christina Baker Kline

139. “I feel myself battening down, fortressing.”

— Christina Baker Kline

140. “It’s really none of your business...”

— Christina Baker Kline

141. “Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones. 1896–1900 My mother drapes a wrung-out cloth across my forehead.”

— Christina Baker Kline

142. “Here I am, there he is, connected by sky.”

— Christina Baker Kline

143. “Mamey said that in her day a woman who had not married by the age of thirty was called a thornback, named after a flat, spiny, prehistoric-looking fish.”

— Christina Baker Kline

144. “Moral allegories about people determined to root out wickedness in others while denying it in themselves.”

— Christina Baker Kline

145. “It’s brave to resist the pull of the familiar. To be selfish about your own needs. I wrestle with that every day.”

— Christina Baker Kline

146. “And this is where we belong.” “No, it isn’t. It’s just where we ended up.”

— Christina Baker Kline

147. “I read once that the act of observing changes the nature of what is observed.”

— Christina Baker Kline

148. “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

149. “When you live on a farm, everyone is uncomfortable much of the time. Too cold, too warm, dirty, bone tired, banged up, injured by a tool or hot grate – too preoccupied to worry much about each other.”

— Christina Baker Kline

150. “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. And the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before. Who are you, Christina Olson? he asked me once. Nobody had ever asked me that. I had to think about it for a while. If.”

— Christina Baker Kline