Top 100 Karen White Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The feelings I had for my sister were jumbled together, like the monkeys in a barrel game we’d had as children. All the brightly colored monkeys with their curved arms tangled and entwined, so convoluted that it was almost impossible to separate them.”

— Karen White

52. “There are times when fear needs to be in the driver’s seat. The best learning and growing happens when wisdom is won from pain.”

— Karen White

53. “The word that came to me now was “defiant.” Because a person had to be defiant to be able to stand amid the wreckage of her life and instead of shaking a fist, pick up a hammer.”

— Karen White

54. “Don’t see the notes. See the music. See the story it is telling you. Allow the music to change you. Allow it to give you the courage to do whatever you need to.”

— Karen White

55. “There is an unease in you, too, which I sensed. You remind me of an anchor searching for a spot to latch on to.”

— Karen White

56. “He was just born with inner demons that were always stronger than he was.”

— Karen White

57. “The weight of fear goes away as soon as we face our monsters and realize they weren’t as scary as we thought.”

— Karen White

58. “My childhood had been vanishing bit by bit while I’d been living in New York, trying to pretend it had never existed. Maybe that was what the old saying – that a person can never really go home again – was all about. You couldn’t go home because even though home might still be there in brick and mortar, everything else would be unrecognizable.”

— Karen White

59. “I’ve always thought my attraction to water was because it offers an unending source of renewal. It’s there with each wave – with each tide. Always wiping the shore clean of all imperfections in time for the next tide.”

— Karen White

60. “Because a garden is the heart of a house, where love is the seed and the dark earth like a mother who nurtures her saplings until they bloom, and then waits for them with furrowed arms to return. It is the story told again and again from my garden: from dust we begin, and to dust we will return again.”

— Karen White

61. “I reached for Helen’s hand, and felt her squeeze back, accepting that I would understand more than most the missing part of the human heart rendered by the absence of a mother and father.”

— Karen White

62. “My mother once told me that a lifetime of good enough was a fair price to pay for a single moment of pure happiness.”

— Karen White

63. “That there are no troubles in life that can’t be sorted through or solved by spending time in the garden.”

— Karen White

64. “Grief was like that, Ceecee had learned. It either opened your heart or closed it.”

— Karen White

65. “Maybe with Sara’s accident he had finally begun to see that life continued after a fall and that the hands that reached to pull you out didn’t have to be your own.”

— Karen White

66. “Looking pretty isn’t about how people see you. It’s about letting people know how you feel about yourself.”

— Karen White

67. “Rainbows always gave her hope – hope that something beautiful waited for those strong enough to survive the storm.”

— Karen White

68. “Sometimes, just when we think we can see our lives on course and we can settle back and get comfortable, a new path opens. Some people just keep going, too scared to veer off the familiar path. But others, well, they step off into the unknown, and find that maybe that was where they were supposed to be all along.”

— Karen White

69. “But maybe everybody was like that, all of us living the lives we had to while dreaming of the lives we wanted.”

— Karen White

70. “I think we become good parents by either copying what our parents did or doing the opposite. The trick is in deciding which way you want to go.”

— Karen White

71. “That no matter how good or bad things were, they were never permanent.”

— Karen White

72. “A pile of timber, remains of either a house or a ship, huddled like a frightened child, cradling a glint of metal in.”

— Karen White

73. “Maybe that’s what being a mother was – not so much the act of giving birth, but the sense of understanding and love born from the need to protect.”

— Karen White

74. “She sobbed for the loss of her father, for his words of wisdom, for his constancy, and for the little girl at his knee she could never be again.”

— Karen White

75. “For the first time in nine years, I felt embarrassed about my abrupt departure and the complete severing of all my ties. My actions had been justified – I was still sure of that. But all the time I’d been away, I’d assumed that everything had remained the same, that people and beliefs hadn’t changed. Which was stupid, because I hadn’t stayed the same. I felt a little of my old resolve not to look back shift and redistribute itself, like sand in and outgoing tide.”

— Karen White

76. “There’s something about mothers and daughters, I think, that makes us always want to hold close at the same time we try to push each other away.”

— Karen White

77. “Do I want to know where I came from? Yes. But that doesn’t impact who I want to be.”

— Karen White

78. “If you want things to change, you have to stop waiting for someone else to make the first move.”

— Karen White

79. “Sometimes we make decisions because it seems to be the only path visible at the moment. It’s only later that we see there was more than one path, but the others were blocked from our vision at the time. That’s the thing with hindsight, you see. Even if you can see it clearly, there’s no going back. It’s at that point we need to turn around and stare ahead and make a new life.”

— Karen White

80. “Don’t think of the realities, Ceecee. Think of possibilities and dreams. Of things you can’t even imagine yet. And write those down.”

— Karen White

81. “I think that her life was about finding the extraordinary in every day. It was how she could sit in her garden on a rainy day and see the beauty in it. It’s what got her out of bed every morning.”

— Karen White

82. “Every woman should have a daughter to tell her stories to. Otherwise, the lessons learned are as useless as spare buttons from a discarded shirt. And all that is left is a fading name and the shape of a nose or the color of hair. The men who write the history books will tell you the stories of battles and conquests. But the women will tell you the stories of people’s hearts.”

— Karen White

83. “I think worrying is a lot like chewing gum. Eventually it runs out of taste, and you’ve got to spit it out.”

— Karen White

84. “But I think sometimes a person has to be forced underwater to see if they’re going to drown or swim.”

— Karen White

85. “No. I simply love Charleston.”

— Karen White

86. “But there in the Lowcountry, the land seemed borrowed from the ocean. With strips of islands separated by creeks and salt marshes, avoiding bridges would be like avoiding snow in Maine in January.”

— Karen White

87. “Actually, they’re really just ordinary plants. But they’ve learned to survive unordinary events, which makes them like the strongest plants in the world. That’s pretty cool.”

— Karen White

88. “Courage isn’t about the absence of fear. Courage is doing the one thing you think you cannot do.”

— Karen White

89. “When the wind shifts against the sun, trust it not, for back it will run.”

— Karen White

90. “Because I will always remember that when I told her I needed help burying a body, the first thing she said was, “Let me go get my shovel.”

— Karen White

91. “Just goes to show that if it has tires or testicles, it’s bound to cause you trouble.”

— Karen White

92. “One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place. – EMILY DICKINSON.”

— Karen White

93. “I was like a child leaving a gift unwrapped, the anticipation more exciting than the reality.”

— Karen White

94. “It’s not always the distance of a trip that determines its value. Sometimes the best trips are only as far as the circumference of your heart.”

— Karen White

95. “But this place of marsh grasses and long-legged birds seemed to have been placed on the Earth by gentle hands, a remedy for the rest of the world.”

— Karen White

96. “I think sometimes the best mothers are simply those who make the decision to love their children every day, regardless of what happens.”

— Karen White

97. “There was something about the past – the reassurance that others had lived and loved and survived before me gave me something to cling to in the present.”

— Karen White

98. “That we need to ask for forgiveness even when we believe we’ve done nothing wrong.” She paused, as if wondering whether she should continue. “And to forgive ourselves. That’s usually the hardest kind of forgiveness.”

— Karen White

99. “I’m considering entering a convent just so I can get some peace and quiet. Except I’m assuming one has to be Catholic for that. Although it might be worth converting.”

— Karen White

100. “Love comes in many shades-just don’t throw it away because it’s not red-hot. Sometimes all that is needed are glowing embers to start the fire.”

— Karen White