Top 80 Kate Bowler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Time really is a circle; I can see that now. We are trapped between a past we can’t return to and a future that is uncertain. And it takes guts to live here, in the hard space between anticipation and realization.”

— Kate Bowler

2. “The horror of cancer has made everything seem like it is painted in bright colors. I think the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.”

— Kate Bowler

3. “Our lives are not problems to be solved. We can have meaning and beauty and love, but nothing even close to resolution.”

— Kate Bowler

4. “This will be a hard journey,” he says. “Is there anything you can set down?”

— Kate Bowler

5. “Time really is a circle; I can see that now. We are trapped between a past we can’t return to and a future that is uncertain.”

— Kate Bowler

6. “What would it mean for Christians to give up that little piece of the American Dream that says, “You are limitless”? Everything is not possible. The mighty kingdom of God is not yet here. What if ‘rich’ did not have to mean ‘wealthy’, and ‘whole’ did not have to mean ‘healed’? What if being the people of “the gospel” meant that we are simply people with good news? God is here. We are loved. It is enough.”

— Kate Bowler

7. “Oh, my friend, that sounds so hard.” Perhaps the weirdest thing about having something awful happen is the fact that no one wants to hear about it. People tend to want to hear the summary but they don’t usually want to hear it from you. And that it was awful. So simmer down and let them talk for a bit. Be willing to stare down the ugliness and sadness. Life is absurdly hard, and pretending it isn’t is exhausting.”

— Kate Bowler

8. “The hardest lessons come from the solutions people, who are already a little disappointed that I am not saving myself. There is always a nutritional supplement, Bible verse or mental process I have not adequately tried. “Keep smiling! Your attitude determines your destiny!” said a stranger named Jane in an email, having heard my news somewhere, and I was immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.”

— Kate Bowler

9. “Don’t skip to the end,” he said, gently. “Don’t skip to the end.”

— Kate Bowler

10. “In my finite life, the mundane has begun to sparkle. The things I love – the things I should love – become clearer, brighter.”

— Kate Bowler

11. “The long dawn of Advent will soon begin, and now we are all learning to wait. Christmas is coming and the baby Jesus will be born, but for now we must sit in the darkness.”

— Kate Bowler

12. “I used to think that grief was about looking backward, old men saddled with regrets or young ones pondering should-haves. I see now that it is about eyes squinting through tears into an unbearable future. The world cannot be remade by the sheer force of love. A brutal world demands capitulation to what seems impossible – separation. Brokeness. An end without an ending.”

— Kate Bowler

13. “A bucket list disguises a dark question as a challenge: what do you want to do before you die? We all want, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” But do we attain that by listing everything we’ve ever wanted to do? Should we really focus on how many moments we can collect?”

— Kate Bowler

14. “This is what happens to all of us. We fall ill. We get old. We can’t have that baby or keep that relationship. We missed our chance to go to this school or take that job. Our parents die before we know them, and our kids forget our love. We lose people before we can learn to live without them.”

— Kate Bowler

15. “But I don’t want ice cream, I want a world where there is no need for pediatric oncology, UNICEF, military budgets, or suicide rails on the top floors of tall buildings. The world would drip with mercy. Thy kingdom come, I pray, and my heart aches. And my tongue trips over the rest. Thy will be done.”

— Kate Bowler

16. “God, I am walking to the edge of a cliff. Build me a bridge. I need to get to the other side.”

— Kate Bowler

17. “So often we are defined by the troubles that we live with rather than the things we conquer. Any persistent suffering requires being afraid. But who can stay awake to fear for so long?”

— Kate Bowler

18. “When they sat beside me, my hand in their hands, my own suffering began to feel like it had revealed to me the suffering of others, a world of those who, like me, are stumbling in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made.”

— Kate Bowler

19. “Life is a privilege, not a reward.”

— Kate Bowler

20. “Everybody pretends that you only die once. But that’s not true. You can die to a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.”

— Kate Bowler

21. “But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships.”

— Kate Bowler

22. “God is here. We are loved. It is enough.”

— Kate Bowler

23. “I think you meant that we just can’t know. And that our brains fill in all the details, for good or for ill. We want to tell ourselves a story – any story – so we can get back to certainty,” I reply. “You know me! I am so desperate to know what’s going to happen. At least so I can prepare.”

— Kate Bowler

24. “We’re all terminal,” he says simply, and it answers my unspoken question. How do you stop? You just stop. You come to the end of yourself. And then you take a deep breath. And say a prayer. And get back to work.”

— Kate Bowler

25. “I feel a spark of horror each time I remember it: we come undone.”

— Kate Bowler

26. “We live and we are loved and we are gone.”

— Kate Bowler

27. “Nothing will exempt me from the pain of being human.”

— Kate Bowler

28. “A lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home first.”

— Kate Bowler

29. “It is an easy lie that has wormed it’s way into my mind: I am the center that must hold.”

— Kate Bowler

30. “Time is not an arrow anymore, and heaven is not tomorrow. It’s here, for a second, when I could drown in the beauty of what I have but also what may never be.”

— Kate Bowler

31. “At a time when I should have felt abandoned by God, I was not reduced to ashes. I felt like I was floating, floating on the love and prayers of all those who hummed around me like worker bees, bringing notes and flowers and warm socks and quilts embroidered with words of encouragement. They came in like priests and mirrored back to me the face of Jesus.”

— Kate Bowler

32. “I must accept the world as it is, or break against the truth of it: my life is made of paper walls. And so is everyone else’s.”

— Kate Bowler

33. “See?” I say to my dad. “I’m not a normal person.” “No,” he says softly, reaching out to pull me to him. “You’re a superhero. But I wish you didn’t have to be.”

— Kate Bowler

34. “Life is a series of losses,” says my father-in-law one afternoon... “What Dad?“... “oh, I was just thinking about how, with age, it is one loss after another, ” he replies. “Huh.” He is right. With age we slowly lose our senses and even our pleasures, our parents and then our friends, preparing us for our own absence. An interesting thought.”

— Kate Bowler

35. “It’s like we’re all floating on the ocean, holding onto our own inner-tube, but people don’t seem to know that we are all sinking. Some are sinking faster than others, but we’re all sinking.”

— Kate Bowler

36. “The great triumph of the “best life now” paradigm was that it summarized the promises of an entire American wellness industry: everything is possible if you only believe. You can find this confident message everywhere from megachurches to Burning Man. It’s expressed in the advertising around Peloton bikes and deluxe yoga retreats. Good vibes are big business.”

— Kate Bowler

37. “Sometimes the body is a weight pulling you the way down. And it’s hard to love the stone that drowns you.”

— Kate Bowler

38. “I want to raise a tough softy. He will know the pain of the world but all will be better for it. He will be brave in the face of heartbreak.”

— Kate Bowler

39. “But the truth is somewhere inside of me: there is no formula. We live and we are loved and we are gone. Tumors budded and spread across my colon and liver without my consent, and here I am.”

— Kate Bowler

40. “I keep having the same unkind thought: I am preparing for death and everyone else is on Instagram. I know it’s not fair, that life is hard for everyone, but I sometimes feel like I’m the only one in the world who is dying. We’re all sinking slowly but one day while everyone watches, I will run out of air, I am going to go under. Even explaining it, I feel more and more frantic. There will be a day when I can’t take my next breath and I will drown.”

— Kate Bowler

41. “If I were to invent a sin to describe what that was – for how I lived – I would not say it was simply that I didn’t stop to smell the roses. It was the sin of arrogance, of becoming impervious to life itself. I failed to love what was present and decided to love what was possible instead.”

— Kate Bowler

42. “And I didn’t know how to say the future was like a language I couldn’t speak anymore.”

— Kate Bowler

43. “Spiritual laws offer an elegant solution to the problem of unfairness. They create a Newtonian universe in which the chaos of the world seems reducible to simple cause and effect. The stories of people’s lives can be plotted by whether or not they follow the rules. In this world there is no such thing as undeserved pain. There is no word for tragedy. There was a moment in.”

— Kate Bowler

44. “I read an article about how people in grief swear because they feel the English language has reached its limit in a time of inarticulate sorrow. Or at least that is what I tell people when I am casually dropping f-bombs over lunch as I explain the mysteries of Lent.”

— Kate Bowler

45. “If you want progress, take up running. If you want meaning, run a church.”

— Kate Bowler

46. “Plans are made. Plans come apart. New delights or tragedies pop up in their place. And nothing human or divine will map out this life, this life that has been more painful than I could have imagined. More beautiful than I could have imagined.”

— Kate Bowler

47. “Before the baby, before the diagnosis, before the pandemic. Before. Before when I was earnest and clever and ignorant, I thought, life is a series of choices. I curated my own life until, one day, I couldn’t. I had accepted the burden of limitless choices only to find out I had few to make.”

— Kate Bowler

48. “We all want our troubles to mean something, to have stature and be validated – but we gain nothing by pitting our woes against another’s. Pain should unite us, as fellow sufferers, as fellow humans.”

— Kate Bowler

49. “Fairness is one of the most compelling claims of the American Dream, a vision of success propelled by hard work, determination, and maybe the occasional pair of bootstraps.”

— Kate Bowler

50. “I would love to report that what I found in the prosperity gospel was something so foreign and terrible to me that I was warned away, but what I discovered was both familiar and painfully sweet: the promise that I could curate my life, minimize my losses, and stand on my successes. And no matter how many times I rolled my eyes at the creeds outrageous certainties, I craved them just the same. I had my own Prosperity Gospel, a flowering weed grown in with all the rest.”

— Kate Bowler