Top 50 Kate Mulgrew Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You need to call on your best and strongest self.”

— Kate Mulgrew

2. “It’s hard to know what’s in a person’s heart when she never says good-bye.”

— Kate Mulgrew

3. “Abortion does not compute with my philosophy.”

— Kate Mulgrew

4. “Of course, the young male demographic has always been the target demographic for ‘Star Trek,’ the men ageing fifteen to about twenty-five or thirty, a very tough market to appeal to.”

— Kate Mulgrew

5. “I am often fond of saying the Trekkers are passionate about a hobby, their hobby is ‘Star Trek.’ They are by and large very imaginative, very intelligent people, and they certainly have been more than generous to me.”

— Kate Mulgrew

6. “I have a very rich and wonderful personal life, and at its core are my sons.”

— Kate Mulgrew

7. “Oh, by the way, you should know that we can’t, after all, use Elizabeth as Janeway’s first name, there happens to be a living author with that name, so we’ve decided to call her Kathryn. We thought that would please you.”

— Kate Mulgrew

8. “Ensign Harry Kim stepped out from behind his station at operations, took my hand in a formal and extremely gracious manner, and said, “I’m Garrett Wang, and this is where you will always find me. Unless, of course, I’m promoted.”

— Kate Mulgrew

9. “There was only one, and it said, “Kate Mulgrew, this is Rick Berman, the executive producer of Star Trek: Voyager, and I simply wanted to say welcome aboard, Captain. I’ll see you on the bridge Monday morning.”

— Kate Mulgrew

10. “Blank, vacant, empty eyes looked not at me but past me, and I knew my mother was lost in a memory I could never understand, nor ever be allowed to share. Some ancient sadness behind her eyes made me feel utterly helpless and alone. She wasn’t my mother in that moment; she was someone else entirely, a stranger to whom my existence mattered not at all. My.”

— Kate Mulgrew

11. “I think people think I’m accessible. I’m never treated as a star, either by fans or other actors, and I like it like that. I don’t get the star treatment. I think that means I’m a good actor. They acknowledge me as a human being, and to me, that’s invalua.”

— Kate Mulgrew

12. “This is not the 19th century, where actors are expected to play completely opposite roles. We’re not typecast, but we’re brought in because somebody thinks that it’s a good fit, so you make it a better fit.”

— Kate Mulgrew

13. “I’ve had young women come to me and say that before they watched ‘Voyager’ it didn’t really occur to them that they could be successful in a higher position in the field of science; girls going to MIT, girls pursuing astrophysics with a view to a career in NASA.”

— Kate Mulgrew

14. “An Edward Povey hangs in my living room and every day I am reminded of his originality, his beauty, and the eternal promise of his craft.”

— Kate Mulgrew

15. “It’s called Star Trek: Voyager. You would be playing the captain of a starship.”

— Kate Mulgrew

16. “Suddenly, eyes heavenward, Mother said, “Do you want to know how special you are? You can see the moon, but the moon can’t see you.”

— Kate Mulgrew

17. “The elegance and the quality – the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

— Kate Mulgrew

18. “Great writing is great writing. It’s as simple as all that.”

— Kate Mulgrew

19. “I often wondered if the pursuit of the illicit was not tacitly encouraged among those in charge, devoted, as they all were, to profit. I could have been carrying on with a psychopathic serial murderer, and no one would have blinked an eye as long as I knew my lines and hit my mark with efficiency and a modicum of verve.”

— Kate Mulgrew

20. “Ours was a bond without resilience. We had not fought for a friendship, we had not suffered because of the lack of one. We had taken wildly divergent paths and, in so doing, we had lost each other.”

— Kate Mulgrew

21. “I think you’re wrong there. It feels selfish at the time, because the pain is excruciating, but there is no nobility in hanging on to something that is miserable and false. We have to fight for our happiness in life.”

— Kate Mulgrew

22. “I laughed, disarmed. “Shopping isn’t really my thing. Not when there are bookstores to be plundered and tombs to be explored.”

— Kate Mulgrew

23. “The work did not let me down, and neither did the part. When Mulgrew suffered, Janeway picked her up. And when Janeway felt like giving up, Mulgrew slapped her into shape. I was put to good use in every way, and this saved me.”

— Kate Mulgrew

24. “I thought again about the miracle of time, its manifest cruelty and sublime mercy.”

— Kate Mulgrew

25. “It is only an organ, the brain, just as the heart is only an organ, and hearts will stop when they have been broken. We give full marks to the broken heart but are less tolerant of the broken mind.”

— Kate Mulgrew

26. “It’s not refreshing where there is confusion or any kind of discomfort in a group that has to work that closely together.”

— Kate Mulgrew

27. “I think the chemistry on the Orange set is extraordinary and I’m going to risk and say this: I think by virtue of the fact that there are not so many men, we are free to be absolutely authentic. There is a lot of freedom and trust.”

— Kate Mulgrew

28. “We are talking about someone who has lived. It must be honored in every respect. The fictional can take any kind of channel – according to the actor’s marriage to the character.”

— Kate Mulgrew

29. “Execution as punishment is barbaric and unnecessary.”

— Kate Mulgrew

30. “As very often happens when we are consumed with the busyness of life, a condition exacerbated by the occasion of death, we are shaken when, at last, we find ourselves useless.”

— Kate Mulgrew

31. “It was curious to me then, as now, the power of the performer over an audience when, in fact, the gift itself springs from the writer’s pen.”

— Kate Mulgrew

32. “Janeway enters from her office, which on the USS Voyager was called the captain’s ready room, and walks slowly through the bridge, greeting each officer in turn.”

— Kate Mulgrew

33. “Over the course of my career, which is about 40 years, I’ve visited plenty of prisons and I know what they’re like.”

— Kate Mulgrew

34. “They loved her because she was an independent spirit, unafraid to speak her mind, passionate, impetuous, and brave. Seldom lauded for her beauty, Mary Ryan had something else to offer, something women could grab ahold of and understand. She had a powerful sense of self, and this proved more magnetic and more relatable than any other single quality.”

— Kate Mulgrew

35. “There is no nobility in hanging into something that is miserable and false.”

— Kate Mulgrew

36. “Homesickness is a sickness of the heart, not of the mind. It is deeply subjective and belongs, inarguably, to the sufferer alone.”

— Kate Mulgrew

37. “I was caught in a private cycle of sadness and the only conceivable relief I could find was in the telling.”

— Kate Mulgrew

38. “I don’t know Kitten,” she said, zipping up her money belt, “but I’ll tell you one thing – if it were a book, I wouldn’t be able to put it down.”

— Kate Mulgrew

39. “I press my face to the window, and I think to myself, There will never be another day like this day. This day will end. Everything passes in front of me with alarming speed, and though I recognize the splendour of the trees and the radiance of the sun, I am detached. This startles and unsettles me.”

— Kate Mulgrew

40. “How is it that words so longed for can hit and miss with equal acuity?”

— Kate Mulgrew

41. “Whatever ill we bore one another, it was always within the accepted confines of sibling rivalry, but in the absence of parents to inspire that rivalry we lost confidence in ourselves, and in our love for one another. We fought for life to continue as it had always been, we fought for our right to be in the house that we loved, we fought for stature, for respect, for equality.”

— Kate Mulgrew

42. “Grief moves through the system much as love does. It seeks expression. So I put my grief where it naturally belonged, in the company of an old and experienced wound. I gathered my feelings, shattered, scattered, and wild, and locked them in the same place where I kept my feelings about my daughter.”

— Kate Mulgrew

43. “It had taken thirty years for me to understand that regrets do not dissipate, they do not abate into sadness – they harden until they have formed into a small fist that often rests quietly in the pit of your stomach but that can suddenly, and without warning, land a punch so powerful you are left doubled over in pain, gasping for breath.”

— Kate Mulgrew

44. “I developed a constitution that could only ever be described as able and hardy.”

— Kate Mulgrew

45. “Actresses. What a bunch of sad saps we are, I thought. Madly in love with the child. Madly in love with the craft. Trying desperately to forge an alliance between the two, and constantly failing. If I were a man, I said to myself, none of this would be in question.”

— Kate Mulgrew

46. “The “banker’s way” meant that you were not fit for acting, not able to channel passion, not sensitive to the subtleties of human nature. In other words, you were a creature of the material world and therefore neither welcomed nor suited to this life, where money was regarded with disdain and personal sacrifice was the order of the day.”

— Kate Mulgrew

47. “Fear is a starkly felt emotion, it is not nuanced, and as I looked around the room, I saw how it had manifested itself in each of my siblings.”

— Kate Mulgrew

48. “The first to greet me was Robbie McNeill, who jumped up from his post at the helm and said, “Welcome aboard, Captain! I cannot tell you how happy I am to meet you!” His handsome Celtic face shone with mischief, and I felt the first gladdening of a spontaneous friendship.”

— Kate Mulgrew

49. “It takes a very long time to sever a marriage in which children are involved. There is a table, two chairs, and a small pile of bargaining chips. This is how it begins, but it ends with one chair in an empty room. The days darken. The children are slices open and split down the middle. Someone takes an arm; someone takes a foot. The car pulling into the driveway on a Friday afternoon becomes a hearse, and everything is couched in lies. The house of old assumes a silence.”

— Kate Mulgrew

50. “Picasso wasn’t in conflict, you can bet your bottom dollar on that. He said, Scram! I need to work, and his mistresses and their spawn ran for the hills. Dickens wasn’t in conflict. He had ten children and wrote as many novels in almost as many years, because it was both understood and appreciated that he was gifted, famous, and rich. The male artist has always been respected.”

— Kate Mulgrew