Top 200 Katherine Center Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 5

51. “I’m not happy because it comes easily to me. I bite and scratch and claw my way toward happiness every day.”

— Katherine Center

52. “We made a choice to do joy on purpose. Not in spite of life’s sorrows. But because of them.”

— Katherine Center

53. “Joy is an antidote to fear. To anger. To boredom. To sorrow.” “But you can’t just decide to feel joyful.” “True. But you can decide to do something joyful.” I considered that. “You can hug somebody. Or crank up the radio. Or watch a funny movie. Or tickle somebody. Or lip-synch your favorite song. Or buy the person behind you at Starbucks a coffee. Or wear a flower hat to work.”

— Katherine Center

54. “Forgiveness is about a mind-set of letting go.” She thought for a second, then said, “It’s about acknowledging to yourself that someone hurt you, and accepting that.” Done, I thought. “Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened.”

— Katherine Center

55. “The world keeps hanging on to this idea that love is for the gullible. But nothing could be more wrong. Love is only for the brave.”

— Katherine Center

56. “Qualifications,” he said, “pale in the face of confidence.”

— Katherine Center

57. “Dying is easy. It’s not dying that’s hard.”

— Katherine Center

58. “So much of life is just grinding through. So many moments just exist to deliver you to the ones that follow. But this moment was a destination in itself.”

— Katherine Center

59. “But you have to live the life you have. You have to find inspiration in the struggle, and pull joy out of the hardship. That’s what we try to do – counterbalance the suffering with laughter, fuzzy blankets, hugs, sing-alongs, sunny-day picnics, chocolate chip cookies, and wildflowers. Because that’s all we can do:.”

— Katherine Center

60. “Life is always a struggle between who you are and who you’d like to be. It’s always a negotiation between how you want it and how it is. There’s no changing that.”

— Katherine Center

61. “Maybe nobody got a happy ending in the end. Maybe all happiness could ever hope to be was a tiny interruption from sorrow.”

— Katherine Center

62. “If you think of human emotions as music, then mine were like an orchestra with no conductor.”

— Katherine Center

63. “After all, life will hand each one of us our fair share of despair and loss and suffering – and then some. That’s certain. But just as certain: It will also give us slices of chocolate cake, and sunny, seventy-two-degree days, and breezes that rustle the trees. Good things are so easy to overlook, but that doesn’t make them any less there.”

— Katherine Center

64. “Joy is an antidote to fear. To anger. To boredom. To sorrow.”

— Katherine Center

65. “The worst thing about sleeping, after something terrible happens, is that sleeping makes you forget. Which is fine, until you wake up.”

— Katherine Center

66. “It’s amazing how brave you can be when you feel safe.”

— Katherine Center

67. “Even just trying, I decided, could be an act of bravery in itself.”

— Katherine Center

68. “Then he bent down in front of me and met my eyes for the first time all day. He looked straight into my pupils until he had my full attention. Then he said, “Whether you walk again or not, I’m going to tell you the one thing I know for certain.” I blinked. “What’s that?” He took a deep breath. “It’s the trying that heals you. That’s all you have to do. Just try.”

— Katherine Center

69. “It’s sadness that gives happiness its meaning.”

— Katherine Center

70. “It’s strange that I could have laughed so hard under those circumstances, during that very dark moment in my life. But I’ve decided sorrow can make things funnier. Endure enough hardship, and you start really needing a good laugh.”

— Katherine Center

71. “I had finally come to understand that not getting what you want is actually the trick to it all. Because not getting what you want forces you to appreciate what you already have.”

— Katherine Center

72. “You have to find inspiration in the struggle, and pull joy out of the hardship.”

— Katherine Center

73. “Needing to find reasons to live had forced me to build a life worth living.”

— Katherine Center

74. “The best revenge is marrying a kind hearted guy with a washboard stomach who brings you coffee in bed every morning.”

— Katherine Center

75. “Isn’t there enough misery in the world? Do I really have to spend my leisure time absorbing more of it?”

— Katherine Center

76. “I just wanted to be good at this. And competent. And tough. And, ultimately, just: anybody but me. I was tired of being a disaster. I was tired of being a trampled-on flower. I wanted to be awesome. That wasn’t too much, was it?”

— Katherine Center

77. “Getting what you want doesn’t make you happy... Having doesn’t make you happy: appreciating does; Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.”

— Katherine Center

78. “We had both moved on. We could both be okay at the same time. We weren’t on a seesaw, for Pete’s sake! There was plenty of okay to go around.”

— Katherine Center

79. “As if you don’t always lose by definition when you push the people who love you away.”

— Katherine Center

80. “I’m always amazed at how fast siblings can warp-speed into a state of rage. It’s like they keep everything they were ever angry about growing up shoved into an overstuffed emotional closet, and at moments like these, it takes about two seconds to swing the door open and start an avalanche.”

— Katherine Center

81. “You get one life, and it only goes forward. And there really are all kinds of happy endings.”

— Katherine Center

82. “Human connection had its upsides, but it sure was a lot of work. The risk-reward ratio was low, at best.”

— Katherine Center

83. “The crash all those years ago shattered the life I had, but the pieces wound up making a pretty good mosaic. That’s what art is, I suppose: transforming things from what they were into what they could be. My life now, without question, is transformed. Maybe that makes it a work of art.”

— Katherine Center

84. “That’s the thing you don’t know – that you can’t know until life has genuinely beaten the crap out of you: I am better for it all. I am better for being broken.”

— Katherine Center

85. “Life is full of danger. Terrible things happen all the time. That doesn’t mean you live your life in fear.”

— Katherine Center

86. “And it’s a girl. And you will love her more than you love yourself. And you’ll disappoint her, too – and never live up to the standards you set for yourself. But don’t worry. She’ll be okay.”

— Katherine Center

87. “I said something so true it was mean.”

— Katherine Center

88. “That’s the thing I always love best about the human race: How we pick ourselves back up over and over and just keep on going.”

— Katherine Center

89. “More than anything, I know that you just have to choose to make the best of things. You get one life, and it only goes forward. And there really are all kinds of happy endings.”

— Katherine Center

90. “It takes guts to walk into a burning building or staunch an arterial bleed – no question. But it also takes a special kind of brain. Firefighters think differently from other people, and this is especially true of me. Because when everybody else is panicking, when the entire whole world is freaking the heck out – that’s when I get calm.”

— Katherine Center

91. “I had told my story. I had put it into words, at last... Telling the story changed the story for me. Not what had happened – that I could never change – but how I responded to it.”

— Katherine Center

92. “He was like a Latino firefighting Ken doll – so bizarrely perfect, he wasn’t even real.”

— Katherine Center

93. “Wasn’t that what love was, after all? Saying yes – not just when it was easy, but also when it was hard?”

— Katherine Center

94. “John Gottman is a researcher who looks at what marriages need to thrive, and one of the many things he talks about is creating a “culture of appreciation” in a relationship – where partners focus on and savor the things about each other that they love.”

— Katherine Center

95. “I had a purpose. I had a reason to take a shower every morning. I had a reason to take care of myself. More than that, I was figuring out how doing something for other people could – in fact – be doing something for yourself. Amazing.”

— Katherine Center

96. “Love makes you better because it’s hard. Taking risks makes you better because it’s terrifying. That’s how it works. You’ll never get anything that matters without earning it. And even what you get” – she lifted her chin in defiance – “you won’t get to keep. Joy is fleeting. Nothing lasts. That’s exactly what courage.”

— Katherine Center

97. “Ten years I’d simmered in my own self-righteousness, holding my grudge against her as if the only way to win was to stay mad the longest.”

— Katherine Center

98. “It’s always better to have what you have than to get what you wanted.”

— Katherine Center

99. “I don’t think trying to be happy means you can never be sad,” I said. “Right?”

— Katherine Center

100. “Wake up. Feel angry. Avoid human contact. Smash dishes. Repeat.”

— Katherine Center