Top 250 Katherine Center Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “That day changed my life more than any other ever has.”

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Katherine Center

165. “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

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

— Katherine Center

167. “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

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

174. “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

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

— Katherine Center

176. “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

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

186. “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

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

— Katherine Center

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

— Katherine Center

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Katherine Center

192. “She argued with me,” Charlie went on, “and she made fun of me, and she told me I was wrong so relentlessly... that of course I had no choice but to fall in love with her.”

— Katherine Center

193. “Tragedy really is a given. There are endless human stories, but they all end the same way. So it can’t be where you’re going that matters. It has to be how you get there. That’s what I’ve decided. It’s all about the details you notice. And the joys you savor. And the hope you refuse to give up on.”

— Katherine Center

194. “I remember reading an article years ago about a study done on the shape of people’s eyes that found people with smiley eyes wound up happier overall. Statistically.”

— Katherine Center

195. “She just painted me exactly as I was. But glowing. As I really looked – but bathed in sunlight and warmth and a lovable mischievousness.”

— Katherine Center

196. “It’s the structure – that “predictable” structure – that does it. Anticipating that you’re heading toward a happy ending lets you relax and look forward to better things ahead. And there’s a name for what you’re feeling when you do that. Hope.”

— Katherine Center

197. “Is everything perfect? Hell, no. Everything’s a mess. A crazy, galloping, heartbreaking mess. You can’t fix everything. Not even close. But you can look for reasons to be grateful. More than that, you can work to create them.”

— Katherine Center

198. “We see what we’re looking for.”

— Katherine Center

199. “It takes a certain kind of courage to be brave in love. A courage you can only get better at through practice.”

— Katherine Center

200. “Maybe staying so busy was a lifeline out of my own grief. But I willingly made myself a supporting character in my own story.”

— Katherine Center