Top 90 Katherine May Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”

— Katherine May

2. “We may drift through years in which we feel like a negative presence in the world, but we are capable of coming back again. We can return to friends and family not only restored but capable of bringing more than we brought before: greater wisdom, more compassion, an increased capacity to reach deep into our roots and know that we will find water.”

— Katherine May

3. “It often seems easier to stay in winter, burrowed down into our hibernation nests, away from he glare of the sun. But we are brave, and the new world awaits us, gleaming and green, alive with the beat of wings. And besides, we have a kind of gospel to tell now, and a duty to share it. We, who have wintered, have learned some things. We sing it out like birds. We let out voices fill the air.”

— Katherine May

4. “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

— Katherine May

5. “We treat each wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored. This means we’ve made a secret of an entirely ordinary process and have thereby given those who endure it a pariah status, forcing them to drop out of everyday life in order to conceal their failure. Yet we do this at a great cost. Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.”

— Katherine May

6. “When it’s really cold, the snow makes a lovely noise underfoot, and it’s like the air is full of stars.”

— Katherine May

7. “That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can.”

— Katherine May

8. “Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.”

— Katherine May

9. “We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”

— Katherine May

10. “The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other.”

— Katherine May

11. “Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.”

— Katherine May

12. “Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness – one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights. In winter, we are invited into a particular mode of sleep: not a regimented eight hours, but a slow, ambulatory process in which waking thoughts merge with dreams, and space is made in the blackest hours to repair the fragmented narratives of our days.”

— Katherine May

13. “Quicker than I ever hoped, I land at the other side of my illness: slightly battle-scarred, slightly hungrier, and a little wiser. I have flaws. I live with restrictions. I have to change. But those sacrifices now seem easy to make, knowing what they will give me. I feel as though I, too, have shed some leaves: those last shreds of belief in my youthful robustness, when I could do anything, endure anything, and bounce back.”

— Katherine May

14. “Nature shows that survival is a practice.”

— Katherine May

15. “But a prayer, at least, is something that happens silently, in secret. It is nothing that I have to advertise or discuss, and so I am able to be discreet about it, disingenuously hanging with the rationalists while I furtively seek the numinous. This urge towards ritual is something new and altogether more risky, because it makes my invisible devotions visible.”

— Katherine May

16. “I’m tired, inevitably. But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough. And my house – my beloved home – has suffered a kind of entropy in which everything has slowly collapsed and broken and worn out, with detritus collecting on every surface and corner, and I have been helpless in the face of it.”

— Katherine May

17. “I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simplest things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it, but I do think it’s instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that something is going wrong. If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt.”

— Katherine May

18. “Certainty is a dead space, in which there’s no more room to grow. Wavering is painful. I’m glad to be traveling between the two.”

— Katherine May

19. “When we endlessly ruminate over distant times, we miss extraordinary things in the present moment. These extraordinary things are, in actual fact, all we have: the here and now.”

— Katherine May

20. “Life has been busy, and in the general rush of things, these vital fragments of my identity have been squeezed out. I have missed them, but in a shrugging kind of way. What can you do when you’re already doing everything?”

— Katherine May

21. “Winter is a time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of pages and dust.”

— Katherine May

22. “That’s the gift of winter: it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not. We can come out of it wearing a different coat.”

— Katherine May

23. “We changed our focus away from pushing through with normal life and towards making a new one. When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs. That’s the gift of winter: it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not. We can come out of it wearing a different coat.”

— Katherine May

24. “Snow creates that quality of awe in the face of a power greater than ours. It epitomises the aesthetic notion of the sublime, in which greatness and beauty couple to overcome you – a small, frail human – entirely.”

— Katherine May

25. “I want to disappear. I’m almost desperate to find a way to absent myself easily from the situation, like cutting around my outline with a craft knife and cleanly excising myself from the record.”

— Katherine May

26. “Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

— Katherine May

27. “When I’m stressed, it feels like my brain has turned to porridge and it’s coming out of my ears. The drugs for my bipolar never really stopped that. Cold water does.”

— Katherine May

28. “This has been a long journey for me, and swimming is just one of the changes I’ve made. I’ve cut out sugar, I make sure I get plenty of alone time, I go on long walks, and I’ve stopped saying yes to everybody. I’ve cut down my working hours. All of these things make a buffer, and I say I like to keep my buffer broad. Sometimes problems come up that narrow my buffer, and then I have to make sure I build it up again. Keeping well is almost a full-time job. But I have a wonderful life.”

— Katherine May

29. “This isn’t about you getting fixed,” he said. “This is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.”

— Katherine May

30. “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through.”

— Katherine May

31. “I spend the morning in the local grocers, bringing in the Christmas provisions: Stilton, ham, Brussels sprouts, a capon of terrifying dimensions. Unfathomable quantities of potatoes. Red wine and white, a bottle of Marsala. Turkish delight and cherry liqueur chocolates. A bag of satsumas, some wrapped in blue and gold paper. Several pots of cream, just in case.”

— Katherine May

32. “Doing those deeply unfashionable things – slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting – is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.”

— Katherine May

33. “I’m feeling the full force of the guilt of being unable to keep up, of having now fallen so far behind that I can’t imagine a way back in. That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope. My only tenable position is to retreat into a dignified silence, but that’s not what I want at all. I want to give an account of myself, force everyone else to understand.”

— Katherine May

34. “I often turn to children’s books at times like these, when I’m yearning to escape into a world that is beautifully rendered and complex, yet soothingly familiar.”

— Katherine May

35. “The truth is that we all have ant years and grasshopper years – years in which we are able to prepare and save and years where we need a little extra help. Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up enough resources to cope with the grasshopper years, but in believing that each grasshopper year is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings.”

— Katherine May

36. “We spend a lot of time talking about leaving a legacy in this world, grand or small, financial or repetitional, so that we won’t be forgotten. But ghost stories show us a different concern, hidden under our bluster: we hope that the dead won’t forget us. We hope that we, the living, will not lose the meanings that seem to evaporate when our loved ones die.”

— Katherine May

37. “But my prayers – earthwise as they are – take me to a place that I am unable to dissect or scrutinise, a space beyond words.”

— Katherine May

38. “Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception.”

— Katherine May

39. “I am not being lazy. I’m not slacking. I’m just letting my attention shift for a while, away from the direct ambitions of the rest of my year. It’s like revving my engines.”

— Katherine May

40. “Life has been busy, and in the general rush of things, these vital fragments of my identity have been squeezed out. I have missed them, but in a shrugging kind of way. What can you do when you’re already doing everything? The problem with “everything” is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away.”

— Katherine May

41. “I wonder if I am perhaps a little too beguiled by this, whether my sense of malaise is actually a lifestyle choice, an urge towards homely perfection to soothe the turmoil that until recently has lurked in my life.”

— Katherine May

42. “The choice of St. Lucy’s Day is significant here. These days, many Northern European countries mark her feast on 13 December, but in Donne’s time, it was celebrated on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, amid the oppressive darkness. It marked the beginning of Christmastide, and then, as now, the experience of grief must surely have been heightened in times of high spirits, when those in mourning can feel at their most isolated.”

— Katherine May

43. “While I’m in the water, I’m laughing and laughing. All my automatic thoughts switch off. I always dip my head under to make sure the cold gets to my brain. And afterwards, I can’t remember what was even worrying me. A switch has been flicked. It’s a physical thing.”

— Katherine May

44. “Winter is a time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all.”

— Katherine May

45. “The ego flares like a struck match: bright, blue, fleeting. I am thankful to be alone when this happens, to let it burn out in private. We should sometimes be grateful for the solitude of night, of a winter. They save us from displaying our worst selves to the waking world.”

— Katherine May

46. “There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on.”

— Katherine May

47. “Much to my regret, I have yet to befriend a robin.”

— Katherine May

48. “Life is clearly teaching me some kind of lesson, but I can’t decipher it yet. I’m worried that it’s about doing less, about staying at home and giving up on adventures for a while. That’s not something I want to learn.”

— Katherine May

49. “We may drift through years in which we feel like a negative presence in the world, but we are capable of coming back again.”

— Katherine May

50. “But if happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too.”

— Katherine May