Top 250 Katherine Center Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “But getting dumped lasts forever. Because a person who loved you decided not to love you anymore.”

— Katherine Center

152. “You can’t make people love you. But you can give the love you long for out to the world. You can be the love you wish you had. That’s the way to be okay. Because giving love to other people is a way of giving it to yourself.”

— Katherine Center

153. “And the idea that anything could just disappear at any moment is something you suddenly understand in a whole new way.”

— Katherine Center

154. “If we were in England, we could call him a shag bandit.”

— Katherine Center

155. “The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.”

— Katherine Center

156. “She knew that joy and sorrow walked side by side. She knew that being alive meant risking one for the other. And she also knew, as I was starting to understand in a whole new way, that it was always better to dance than to refuse.”

— Katherine Center

157. “They will ignore you. They will exclude you. They will resent you. Being nice won’t help. Working hard won’t matter. Just by your very presence there, you are attacking them, trying to steal something that’s rightfully theirs, trying to infiltrate and dismantle their brotherhood.”

— Katherine Center

158. “I would never tell you that the life you wanted couldn’t have been exactly as great as you planned. But you have to live the life you have. You have to find inspiration in the struggle, and pull joy out of the hardship.”

— Katherine Center

159. “Maybe love isn’t a judgment you render – but a chance you take. Maybe it’s something you choose to do over and over. For yourself and everyone else.”

— Katherine Center

160. “This is what it means to be fully alive. To feel it all – the joy and the sorrow, the hope and the fear. This is what life demands of us. You just have to stay, and try, and let life break your heart.”

— Katherine Center

161. “But now I saw the emotional landscape quite differently – more like the pointillism of a Seurat painting: each color made up of many other colors. Look closely, and it’s dots. Stand back, and it’s an afternoon on the lake – all the colors relying on each other for texture and meaning.”

— Katherine Center

162. “The point is to be happy anyway. As often as you can.”

— Katherine Center

163. “Love makes you muddled. Love clouds your judgment. Love derails you with longing.”

— Katherine Center

164. “The more good things you look for, the more you find.”

— Katherine Center

165. “The people we love help teach us who we are. The best versions of who we are, if we’re lucky.”

— Katherine Center

166. “But I guess that’s the great thing about life – it gives you chance after chance to rethink it all. Who you want to be. How you want to live. What really matters.”

— Katherine Center

167. “I’d saved her, but she’d saved me right back.”

— Katherine Center

168. “There’s so much death in that world, but laughter is life. You need it.”

— Katherine Center

169. “The answer wasn’t to never love anyone. It was to love like crazy whenever you could.”

— Katherine Center

170. “We could have let it all go long before now. We could have tried less hard. We could have given up in the face of all our misunderstandings. But we didn’t. It takes a certain kind of courage to be brave in love. A courage you can only get better at through practice.”

— Katherine Center

171. “And loving other people really does turn out, in the end, to be a genuine way of loving yourself.”

— Katherine Center

172. “So I decided something right then: Every chance you take is a choice. A choice to decide who you are.”

— Katherine Center

173. “People loving you for your best qualities is not the same as people loving you despite your worst.”

— Katherine Center

174. “But she was gone before I even fully realized that losing her was possible.”

— Katherine Center

175. “Usually, when you see people for the last time, you don’t know it’s the last time.”

— Katherine Center

176. “Was he flirting with me or being a pain? Had he already won me over, or did I still have a choice?”

— Katherine Center

177. “All I knew was that watching your children survive their childhoods was so much worse than surviving your own.”

— Katherine Center

178. “And I guess there really is something profoundly healing about letting somebody love you.”

— Katherine Center

179. “Every real human interaction is made up of a million tiny moving pieces. Not a simple one-note situation: a symphony of cues to read and decipher and evaluate and pay attention.”

— Katherine Center

180. “People who wanted to wrestle with complicated emotions became therapists, or poets. People who wanted to keep things simple became firefighters.”

— Katherine Center

181. “I know why women don’t speak out. It’s hard enough just to survive.”

— Katherine Center

182. “All we can do is put away our anger, and our blame, and our guns” – see what I did there? – “and try to make things better instead of worse. That’s the only answer there is.”

— Katherine Center

183. “I knew too much about life to pretend that it wasn’t half tragedy. We lose the people we love. We disappoint each other. We misunderstand. We get lost and lonely and angry. But right now, in this moment, we were okay.”

— Katherine Center

184. “Needing to find a reason to live had forced me to build a life worth living. I would never say the accident was a good thing. I would never claim that everything happens for a reason. Like all tragedies, it was senseless. But the one thing I knew for sure: The greater our capacity for sorrow becomes, the greater our capacity for joy.”

— Katherine Center

185. “Well, children can’t see their parents clearly until they grow up.”

— Katherine Center

186. “I would never tell you that the life you wanted couldn’t have been exactly as great as you planned. 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: carry the sorrow when we have to, and absolutely savor the joy when we can.”

— Katherine Center

187. “There’s a quote I love about writing by Dwight V. Swain: “A story is something you do to a reader.”

— Katherine Center

188. “I didn’t like her, but I loved her. And he’d underestimated me, as well. Because it’s so much harder to love someone who’s difficult than to love someone who’s easy.”

— Katherine Center

189. “Things happen. Lives get broken. Some people never can put themselves back together.”

— Katherine Center

190. “The people we love help teach us who we are.”

— Katherine Center

191. “We’re all just doing the best we can. We’re all struggling with our struggles. Nobody has the answers. And everybody, deep down, is a little bit lost.”

— Katherine Center

192. “All the hardships and insults and disappointments in life didn’t make this one blissful moment less important. They made it more. They made it matter. The very fact that it couldn’t last was that reason to hold on to it – however, we could.”

— Katherine Center

193. “Then something became very clear to me: As terrible as Parker made my life, she made her own even worse. Nothing she could do to me was as soul-crushing as what she did to herself. In turning away from kindness, she’d chosen a life of torment.”

— Katherine Center

194. “It really left me thinking about what stories are for.”

— Katherine Center

195. “We don’t get to know the whole story all at once. And where we’re headed matters so much less than how we get there.”

— Katherine Center

196. “And here, right here, is the trouble with being close to other people. The better they know you, the better they can hurt you.”

— Katherine Center

197. “She was trying to teach me the rules of being a successful woman as she understood them. And it never occurred to her that women might be able to write those rules for themselves.”

— Katherine Center

198. “Sometimes anybody really isn’t better than nobody.”

— Katherine Center

199. “It turned out to be kind of like when an old song comes on the radio and you think, “I love this song” but then as you keep listening you remember you never really loved it, you were just excited for a second because you recognized it.”

— Katherine Center

200. “Color outside your own lines. Allow yourself another way of seeing.”

— Katherine Center