Top 90 Katherine May Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Katherine May

54. “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

55. “Here on the deck of the Andrea in the outer reaches of the Atlantic, approaching a personal winter, I’m certain that the cold has healing powers that I don’t yet come close to understanding. After all, you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?”

— Katherine May

56. “Now my evenings have the consolation of mugs of emerald-green tea made with fresh mint. It’s not so bad, but the time seems to stretch, and I’m finding myself in bed by nine, perhaps earlier if I can get away with it. It’s a profoundly unsociable way of living, but it gives me those clearheaded early mornings in the inky dark, when I light candles around the house and relish two straight hours when nobody can make any demands on me.”

— Katherine May

57. “How could I ever admit that I chose the muffled roar of starlings over the noisy demands of the workplace?”

— Katherine May

58. “I didn’t deserve a holiday. Are you even allowed a holiday when you’re signed off from work? What on earth would people think if they found out? We’ve moved a long way away from the time when we saw a recuperative break as a legitimate strategy to aid your recovery. I wonder if there’s any room left for recovery at all. We are either off or on.”

— Katherine May

59. “We need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we’re finding our feet again.”

— Katherine May

60. “I have flaws. I have restrictions. I have to change.”

— Katherine May

61. “Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”

— Katherine May

62. “Sometimes the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one. We need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on. That sometimes everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it and to be kind. To find our own grit, in our own time.”

— Katherine May

63. “But here it is: my winter. It’s an open invitation to transition into a more sustainable life and to wrest back control over the chaos I’ve created. It’s a moment when I have to step into solitude and into contemplation. It’s also a moment when I have to walk away from old alliances, to let the strings of some friendships fall loose, if only for a while.”

— Katherine May

64. “On the way back to shore, I sit on the deck and let the low golden light slant onto my face. This is northern sunbathing – soaking the only part of your body you dare expose to the elements in the most diffuse warmth imaginable and feeling renewed.”

— Katherine May

65. “In winter, you are never more than a few steps from darkness.”

— Katherine May

66. “You need to live a life that you can cope with, not the one that other people want. Start saying no. Just do one thing a day. No more than two social events in a week.”

— Katherine May

67. “I didn’t feel that the two should be in conflict – achieving your potential and not being completely miserable. Happiness is the greatest skill we’ll ever learn.”

— Katherine May

68. “In fact I think I prefer a strange tangle of both, an idea with porous boundaries that keeps me guessing. We are not offered any definite conclusions, only the continuing quest. Certainties harden us, and eventually we come to defend them as if the world can’t contain a multiplicity of views. We are better off staying soft. It gives us room to grow and absorb, to make space for all the other glorious notions that will keep coming at us across a lifetime.”

— Katherine May

69. “The only thing breaking me was pretending to be like everyone else.”

— Katherine May

70. “I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I’ve learned them the hard way. 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.”

— Katherine May

71. “You need to live a life that you can cope with, not the one that other people want.”

— Katherine May

72. “It feels good to be making something, even while my contribution to the world feels very small. It allows me to imagine I’m part machine, fluid and efficient. And while.”

— Katherine May

73. “That’s what the natural world does – it carries on surviving. Sometimes it flourishes, lays on fat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey; and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living.”

— Katherine May

74. “If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt.”

— Katherine May

75. “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

76. “This is a mirror of my own winter, or how it seems to me: everybody else is drowsing while I am wide awake and hounded by sharp fears.”

— Katherine May

77. “Happiness is our potential, the product of a mind that’s allowed to think as it needs to, that has enough of what it requires, that is free of the terrible weight of bullying and humiliation.”

— Katherine May

78. “There is not enough night left for us. We have lost our true instincts for darkness, its invitation to spend some time in the proximity of our dreams. Our personal winters are so often accompanied by insomnia: perhaps we’re drawn towards that unique space of intimacy and contemplation, darkness and silence, without really knowing what we’re seeking. Perhaps, after all, we are being urged towards our own comfort.”

— Katherine May

79. “However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful. Yet it’s also inevitable. We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves. We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun, an endless, unvarying high season.”

— Katherine May

80. “The loose communities that we find in spiritual or religious gatherings were once entirely ordinary to us, but now it seems more radical to join them, a brazen challenge to the strictures of the nuclear family, the tendency to stick within tight friendship groups, the shrinking away from the awe-inspiring. Congregations are elastic, stretching to take in all kinds of people and bringing up unexpected perspectives and insights. We need them now more than ever.”

— Katherine May

81. “I have been hunting down a mirror for myself, a representation of how I feel at this moment in time. A severed child caught between two worlds, not sure if I can believe in any solid future. It’s not exactly comforting to find it, but it’s certainly satisfying, like a shared moment of outrage or the pleasure of a sad film.”

— Katherine May

82. “People admired me for how much I got done. I lapped it up, but felt secretly that I was only trying to keep pace with everyone else, and they seemed to be coping far better. After all, I had colleagues who regularly replied to emails after midnight, long after I was asleep. In actual fact, I was ashamed.”

— Katherine May

83. “Celebrating that change in the presence of others made a difference. It added a little joy to that simple act of noticing and bolstered the dark need that lurked behind it with fellow human spirit. It took away a little of the shame at needing it.”

— Katherine May

84. “Mine is a personal animism, hushed by my conscious brain, nurtured by my unconscious.”

— Katherine May

85. “It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm.”

— Katherine May

86. “It is the forgotten seam in our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter: the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it. Without it, I feel I am lacking some essential nutrient, some vitamin found only when you go digging in your own soil.”

— Katherine May

87. “I don’t want to sit like a brooding hen on the nest of my past achievements. I want to keep on going deep into the uncertain act of making, to see the unknown world stretch out before me and to devote myself to exploring it.”

— Katherine May

88. “Once I abandon the fight to return to sleep and claim my wakefulness, I can find a slanting love for this part of the night, the almost-morning. As the only one awake, I luxuriate in a space in which I can drink in the silence. It’s an undemanding moment in the twenty-four-hour cycle. Nobody can reasonably expect you to be checking texts or emails, and the scrolling feeds of social media have fallen quiet. In a world where it’s hard to feel alone, this finally represents solitude.”

— Katherine May

89. “This, then, is how I turned my year: not in a single high-stakes moment, but in a series of gestures that gently acknowledge the change taking place but which have an eye on the continuities too.”

— Katherine May

90. “In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again. These wants are often astonishingly inaccurate: drugs and alcohol, which poison instead of reintegrate; relationships with people who do not make us feel safe or loved; objects that we do not need, cannot afford, which hang around our necks like albatrosses of debt long after the yearning for them has passed.”

— Katherine May

91. “I told her about Iceland and how obviously, I wouldn’t be able to go. “No,” she said, “I think you should. What difference does it make to be in one country or another, if you’re feeling ill anyway? You might as well enjoy these things. You never know what’s around the corner.”

— Katherine May

92. “The night inches on. I could make a career out of worrying, if only anyone would pay me. What do I worry about during these long nights? Money. Death. Failure. The familiar horsemen of those quiet apocalypses that happen only when the sun‘s gone down. In the middle of the night, I can worry my house onto the edge of a cliff, forever about to topple onto the rocks below. I am only ever a missed wage packet away from total annihilation. I carry too much debt. I own nothing. I own too much...”

— Katherine May

93. “Anxiety lurked in my body like groundwater, and every now and then it would rain and the level would rise up into my throat, surging into my sinuses, banking up behind my eyes.”

— Katherine May

94. “I may love the great outdoors in winter, but even I draw the line at sunset. When November comes, I have no desire to leave the house after dark. My instinct is to hibernate the evenings away.”

— Katherine May

95. “I want to be allowed to bask in the glory of my recovery from the brink, rather than to still be teetering on the edge of it, no matter what I do.”

— Katherine May