Top 200 Katherine Center Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I don’t want my kids to be like me. I want them to be better than me.”

— Katherine Center

52. “It’s my battle cry: Appreciate Everything!”

— Katherine Center

53. “You can’t ask someone to love you or be there for you or do the right thing – and you certainly can’t guilt them into it. Either they will or they won’t.”

— Katherine Center

54. “Whales have a highly evolved language that works like sonar. They have special neurons called spindle cells. Human have them, too, and they’re linked with self-awareness, and compassion, and language. Except whales have had them about fifteen million years longer than we have.”

— Katherine Center

55. “Exhaustion is a friend to the grieving. I was the kind of tired where sleep just reaches out and tugs you into its gentle sea without you ever making a choice.”

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

57. “It just seems to me there’s enough pain in the world – and not nearly enough pleasure. I guess once you’ve had enough kidney stones, hot candle wax on the nipples seems less appealing.”

— Katherine Center

58. “Because that’s all we can do: carry the sorrow when we have to, and absolutely savor the joy when we can. Life is always, always both.”

— Katherine Center

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Katherine Center

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Katherine Center

67. “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

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Katherine Center

79. “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

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

83. “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

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

— Katherine Center

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

96. “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

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

— Katherine Center

98. “Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn’t to never feel hope, or bliss, or love-but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came.”

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

100. “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