Top 40 Kate Bolick Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Isn’t that how falling in love so often works? Some stranger appears out of nowhere and becomes a fixed star in your universe.”

— Kate Bolick

2. “I’ve always considered myself to be similar. I’m no recluse, but, like an introvert, I need a lot of time alone to reflect and recharge, and I am easily drained by being around others, but at the same time, like an extrovert, I’m energized by parties and conversation.”

— Kate Bolick

3. “Our conversations had a limitless quality that I loved. It was a relief to embark on a simple friendship with a man, free to talk about anything we wanted, without the roller coaster of emotions and confusion over roles and expectations.”

— Kate Bolick

4. “If you are lucky, home is not only a place that you leave, but also a place where you someday arrive.”

— Kate Bolick

5. “The idea of love seemed an invasion,” she wrote. “I had thoughts to think, a craft to learn, a self to discover. Solitude was a gift. A world was waiting to welcome me if I was willing to enter it alone.”

— Kate Bolick

6. “Didn’t she remember that being single is more than just following your whims – that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week?”

— Kate Bolick

7. “When you find yourself at yet another crossroads, sorting out your best next step, it’s as useful to know what you don’t want as what you do.”

— Kate Bolick

8. “I never shall be an old maid, because I have elected to be a Girl Bachelor.”

— Kate Bolick

9. “Over the years I’ve noticed that only men use this phrase – “unlucky in love” – in reference exclusively to unmarried women, as if they can’t possibly comprehend that contentment or even happiness is possible without the centrality of a man.”

— Kate Bolick

10. “Whom to marry, and when will it happen – these two questions define every woman’s existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does or doesn’t practice. She may grow up to love women instead of men, or to decide she simply doesn’t believe in marriage. No matter. These dual contingencies govern her until they’re answered, even if the answers are nobody and never.”

— Kate Bolick

11. “I was most alive when alone, negotiating odd encounters on the subway, surging along the sidewalk with a million faceless others. It was an expansive sensation, evasive, addictive. Each morning I rushed from the apartment to find it, as if late for an appointment.”

— Kate Bolick

12. “In 1896 the newspaperwoman Nellie Bly asked Susan B. Anthony if she’d ever been in love. Her answer: “Bless you, Nellie, I’ve been in love a thousand times! But I never loved any one so much that I thought it would last. In fact, I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper.”

— Kate Bolick

13. “By now, at age thirty-three, comparing myself to my mother had become an increasingly unnerving habit. Every year I’d do the math, calculating where I was in relation to where she’d been, and then, on the prediction that I’d also die when she had, figure out how many years I had left.”

— Kate Bolick

14. “I’ve always known that a book will find you when you need to be found; in New York I learned that so does history.”

— Kate Bolick

15. “How even I, “a dutiful daughter,” as Simone de Beauvoir once described her young self, was living a life so different from my mother’s; when she was my age she was married, about to become pregnant with me. I was beginning to think that this habit of mind – constantly tracing myself back to my mother, to where she’d begun and left off – wasn’t idiosyncratic, but something that many if not most women did, a feature of the female experience.”

— Kate Bolick

16. “You are born, you grow up, you become a wife. But what if it wasn’t this way? What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending? What would that look and feel like?”

— Kate Bolick

17. “This, I thought, is what it means to be alone: You are solid, intact, and then, without warning, a hinge unlatches, the chimney flue swings open, the infinite freezing black night rushes in, and there is nothing to do but grope in the cold to set things right again.”

— Kate Bolick

18. “She’d raised me in her image to be the one true friend she’d never had, and now neither of us would ever know the conversations we’d waited for all our lives.”

— Kate Bolick

19. “We need much better and many more models. We need movies where women are attractive and interesting and have great lives and may not be married.” She cautioned that conjuring possible selves on our own isn’t enough – institutional support is also necessary. “Schools, workplaces, laws, norms, the media – they all need to make it clear that there are other ways to be a woman or a member of one minority group or another.”

— Kate Bolick

20. “When the present feels as endless as an impossibly long hallway between airport terminals, white and sterile and numb, we’re particularly receptive to signs.”

— Kate Bolick

21. “She loved so many things – cats, dogs, roses, people – that sometimes I wonder if she chose to be alone to best enjoy them all.”

— Kate Bolick

22. “What bothered me was the assumption that because I was a woman in her early thirties, I must be “desperate” for marriage. At first this seemed only irritating; every romantic encounter arrived in the same cumbersome frame I had to repeatedly dismantle. But after a while, the fixedness of this belief felt not merely claustrophobic and repetitive but downright pernicious.”

— Kate Bolick

23. “It inspired me to diversify my portfolio of attachments, so to speak, partly so I wouldn’t overwhelm any one person with the fire hose of my ‘undelivered discourse,’ but also to protect myself from leaning to heavily on a buttress that couldn’t and shouldn’t sustain my full weight.”

— Kate Bolick

24. “I said to myself, the only place this horrific jealousy exists is inside of you. If you stop feeling it, it will disappear.”

— Kate Bolick

25. “But the knowing was visceral: if I became a mother, I’d lose myself.”

— Kate Bolick

26. “Married women, especially those with children, tended to assume a superior stance, as if their insights into people and relationships came preapproved, even though single women drew from a larger store of experiences and had often seen more of the world, from which the wisdom I wanted to discover was derived.”

— Kate Bolick

27. “Each of us is a museum that opens for business the moment we’re born, with memory the sole curator. How could a staff of one possibly stay abreast of all those holdings? No sooner does a moment occur than it’s relegated to the past, requiring that it be labeled, sorted, and filed into the appropriate cabinet.”

— Kate Bolick

28. “The question I’d long posed to myself – whether to be married or to be single – is a false binary. The space in which I’ve always wanted to live – indeed, where I have spend my adulthood – isn’t between those two poles, but beyond it. The choice between being married versus being single doesn’t even belong here in the twenty-first century.”

— Kate Bolick

29. “When you’re single, you are often buried in time, your mouth and eyes and ears stuffed with it. You hate it, rail against it, do whatever you can to get rid of it – work too much, drink too much, sleep around, make unsuitable friends, create an imaginary future filched from the lives of dead forgotten female writers...”

— Kate Bolick

30. “I had absolutely no idea how to make sense of myself.”

— Kate Bolick

31. “If a woman liked to play with words and set them in patterns and make pictures with them, and was taking care of herself and bothering nobody, and enjoyed her life without a lot of bawling children around, why shouldn’t she?”

— Kate Bolick

32. “Those of us who’ve bypassed the exits for marriage and children tend to motor through our thirties like unlicensed drivers, unauthorized grownups.”

— Kate Bolick

33. “At first I thought it was simply that the specter of the crazy bag lady has been branded so simply into the collective female consciousness that we’re stuck with her. Now I realized I was wrong. What is haunting about the bag lady is not only that she is left to wander the streets, cold and hungry, but that she’s living proof of what it means to not be loved. Her apparition will endure as long as women consider the love of a man the most supreme of all social validations.”

— Kate Bolick

34. “Today we tell girls to grow up to be or do whatever they want. But the cultural pressure to become a mother remains very strong; rare is she who doesn’t at least occasionally succumb to the nagging fear that if she remains childless, she’ll live to regret it.”

— Kate Bolick

35. “Each of us is a museum that opens for business the moment we’re born, with memory the sole curator. How could a staff of one possibly stay abreast of all those holdings?”

— Kate Bolick

36. “Key to women’s ascent was the typewriter. Invented in 1867 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the original model was decorated with floral decals and mounted on a treadle table, like a sewing machine; promoters proclaimed it perfect for a woman’s “nimble fingers.”

— Kate Bolick

37. “Those of us who’ve bypassed the exits for marriage and children tend to motor through our thirties like unlicensed drivers, unauthorized grown-ups. Some days it’s great – you’re a badass outlaw on the joyride that is life! Other days you’re an overgrown adolescent borrowing your dad’s car and hoping the cops don’t pull you over. Along.”

— Kate Bolick

38. “She never talked about wanting to have children. I believe she wanted solitude and cats.”

— Kate Bolick

39. “Being a wife and mother wasn’t just plan A; it was the only plan. To live otherwise meant to live without a template, consigned to the margins, discouraged from seeking a new and different happiness.”

— Kate Bolick

40. “The overall number of single women in America starts at a high of 34 percent in 1890, slides down one percent per decade, all the way to the bottom point of the V – 17 percent in 1960 – and then climbs back up and up, 2 percent per decade, to 53 percent in 2013.”

— Kate Bolick

41. “But now I know that a house is a book, just not the kind we’re accustomed to reading.”

— Kate Bolick

42. “Coupling, I realized, can encourage a fairly static way of being, with each partner exaggerating or repressing certain qualities in relation to the other’s.”

— Kate Bolick

43. “What is haunting about the bag lady is not only that she is left to wander the streets, cold and hungry, but that she’s living proof of what it means to not be loved. Her apparition will endure as long as women consider the love of a man the most supreme of all social validations.”

— Kate Bolick

44. “Living alone forces people to figure out how to manage their emotional needs.”

— Kate Bolick