Top 100 Christina Baker Kline Quotes
#1. I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.
Christina Baker Kline
#2. The most surprising thing, honestly, is that so few Americans know about the orphan trains. I was also surprised at the resilience and fortitude of the riders I met, their pragmatism and grace. I don't know whether this is a Midwestern trait or simply a human one.
Christina Baker Kline
#3. Girls from my graduating class come into the store brandishing solitaire diamonds like Legion of Honor medals, as if they've accomplished something significant - which I guess they think they have, though all I can see is a future of washing some man's clothes stretching ahead of them.
Christina Baker Kline
#6. The reading part of her feels private, between her and the characters in a book.
Christina Baker Kline
#7. Radiation is relentless: my protocol is five days a week, 33 sessions altogether.
Christina Baker Kline
#10. I feel myself retreating to someplace deep inside. It is a pitiful kind of childhood, to know that no one loves you or is taking care of you, to always be on the outside looking in.
Christina Baker Kline
#13. We don't talk about the danger
but what I imagine is a cartoon version, bullets flying and each boy a super hero, running, invincible, through a spray of gunfire.
Christina Baker Kline
#14. He reaches over and touches my necklace. "You still have it. That gives me faith."
"Faith in what?"
"God, I suppose. No, I don't know. Survival.
Christina Baker Kline
#16. The twists and turns of your life can be so unexpected, and that's a good thing to learn.
Christina Baker Kline
#17. And so your personality is shaped. You know too much, and this knowledge makes you wary. You grow fearful and mistrustful. The expression of emotion does not come naturally, so you learn to fake it. To pretend. To display an empathy you don't actually feel.
Christina Baker Kline
#19. My entire life has felt like chance. Random moments of loss and connection. This is the first one that feels, instead, like fate.
Christina Baker Kline
#21. With a hardcover, you get two chances, a year apart, for the book to make an impact - often with a new cover featuring artfully crafted snippets of reviews, a new marketing campaign and maybe even a new publisher.
Christina Baker Kline
#22. There's no question that my son is better prepared for college than I was. He manages his time better, is more efficient and more directed, and spends less time in lines and more time doing exactly what he sets out to do.
Christina Baker Kline
#24. We are headed toward the unknown, and we have no choice but to sit quietly in our hard seats and let ourselves be taken there.
Christina Baker Kline
#25. Turtles carry their homes on their backs." Running her finger over the tattoo, she tells him what her dad told her: "They're exposed and hidden at the same time. They're a symbol of strength and perseverance.
Christina Baker Kline
#26. Other resources I relied on during my orphan train research were the Children's Aid Society; the New York Foundling (I attended their 140th homecoming in 2009 and met a number of train riders there); the New York Tenement Museum;
Christina Baker Kline
#28. I ... am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go.
Christina Baker Kline
#30. I think fondly of the rabbit holes I disappeared down when I researched papers for history and English because I couldn't find quite what I was looking for, or because I had to go through so much material to find examples for my thesis.
Christina Baker Kline
#33. It's all part of Dina's unwavering message: Be grateful. Dress like a normal person. Don't have opinions. Eat the food that's put in front of you. Molly
Christina Baker Kline
#34. We took away their country and their means of support. It was for this and against this that they made war. Could anyone expect less?
Christina Baker Kline
#35. It was pouring earlier, great sheets of rain, and now the clouds outside the window are crystal tipped like mountain peaks in the sky, rays emanating downward like an illustration in a children's bible.
Christina Baker Kline
#36. Her absence is a presence, ghostly and haunting, touching all who knew her. It is impossible that she disappeared, inconceivable that she will never return. She is at once nowhere and everywhere, a constant shadow, elusory and insubstantial, her life an unkept promise, a half-remembered dream.
Christina Baker Kline
#37. I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over and over again.
Christina Baker Kline
#39. No substitute for the living, perhaps, but I wasn't given a choice. I could take solace in their presence or I could fall down in a heap, lamenting what I'd lost. The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on.
Christina Baker Kline
#42. This isn't bickering. This is classic mother-daughter communications. I've been reading up on it.
Christina Baker Kline
#46. I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best, and we should all just be kind to each other.
Christina Baker Kline
#47. She knows from experience that tough and weird is preferable to pathetic and vulnerable, and she wears her Goth persona like armor.
Christina Baker Kline
#49. For a few years, skeins of yarn piled up in baskets around the house. There weren't enough humans in my mother's orbit to wear all the scarves and sweaters and hats she knitted. And then, as suddenly as she started, she lost interest, leaving needles still entwined in half-finished fragments.
Christina Baker Kline
#50. There was never a cataclysmic moment in which things might have been, however briefly, etched in relief against memory, against things to come - a moment which, by its sheer magnitude, defined her history and her future. Instead, Kathryn thinks, she has disintegrated slowly over a number of years.
Christina Baker Kline
#51. I have found that the biggest moments in life, the ones that change everything, usually catch you by surprise.
Christina Baker Kline
#52. I know all too well how it is when the beautiful visions you've been fed don't match up with reality.
Christina Baker Kline
#54. I don't think that trauma is an illusion; there is no question in my mind that circumstances beyond our control can shape and define us. But ultimately, we make choices about letting ourselves be defined by our pasts.
Christina Baker Kline
#58. My parents are a bedrock. And I have three complex, strong, and funny sisters who inspire and sustain me.
Christina Baker Kline
#59. It's as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn't - which, of course, is pretty often - she is surprised and affronted.
Christina Baker Kline
#61. Life's small details are the ones that interest me, anyway. The big questions are too hard to parse.
Christina Baker Kline
#63. I shrank back, my face flaming as if I'd been struck. And in that moment something changed. I didn't trust her anymore. When she cried, I felt numb. After that, she called me heartless, unfeeling. And maybe I was. A
Christina Baker Kline
#64. Book clubs, both online and in person, have become a large percentage of the reading public, and many of them won't consider reading books in hardcover.
Christina Baker Kline
#65. It is a terrible thing to find the love of your life.... You know too well what you're missing when it's gone.
Christina Baker Kline
#66. When you can type a few words into a search engine and land on your topic - or when you can scan a Shakespeare play for specific words or symbols - what opportunities might you miss to expand your thinking in unexpected ways?
Christina Baker Kline
#67. The people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments.
Christina Baker Kline
#68. Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she's come to expect it. When something does go right, she hardly knows what to think.
Christina Baker Kline
#69. But it kind of feels nice to nurture her resentment, to foster it. It's something she can savor and control, this feeling of having been wronged by the world.
Christina Baker Kline
#70. Mamey said that in her day a woman who had not married by the age of thirty was called a thornback, named after a flat, spiny, prehistoric-looking fish.
Christina Baker Kline
#71. Dina listens to conservative talk radio, belongs to a fundamentalist Christian church, and has a "Guns don't kill people - abortion clinics do" bumper sticker on her car.
Christina Baker Kline
#72. People who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles.
Christina Baker Kline
#73. Forgive me if I'm wrong. But are you-were you-did you come here on a train from New York about ten years ago?
Christina Baker Kline
#75. She feels like a circus clown who wakes up one morning and no longer wants to glue on the red rubber nose.
Christina Baker Kline
#77. It's hard to say what's in my head. It's been a long time since anyone cared to ask.
Christina Baker Kline
#78. The first twenty-three years of my life are the ones that shaped me, and the fact
Christina Baker Kline
#79. I have come to think that's where Heaven is, a place in the memories of other where our best selves live
Christina Baker Kline
#80. When I start a new novel and find myself diverted by domestic activities, many of which I genuinely enjoy, I panic that I will never write another word.
Christina Baker Kline
#82. All those children sent on trains to the Midwest - collected off the streets of New York like refuse, garbage on a barge, to be sent as far away as possible, out of sight.
Christina Baker Kline
#83. Other signs of the apocalypse proliferate. After a pop-up ad appears on her screen, Vivian announces that she plans to sign up for Netflix. She buys a digital camera on Amazon with one click. She asks Molly if she's ever seen the sneezing baby panda video on YouTube. She even joins Facebook.
Christina Baker Kline
#84. It's human nature to want to think the best of others, but if you listen carefully, people will always tell you who they are.
Christina Baker Kline
#87. Every decision I make is determined solely by the spark and limitations of my own perspective
Christina Baker Kline
#88. I will not serve lunch to anyone in the middle of a workday. I rarely rearrange my furniture or cabinets; once I find a drawer for something, it stays there. I don't garden. And I don't knit.
Christina Baker Kline
#89. It is good to test your limits now and then, learn what the body is capable of, what you can endure.
Christina Baker Kline
#90. (How quickly, with a slight twist in perception, do people's strengths become flaws!)
Christina Baker Kline
#91. So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason - to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?
Christina Baker Kline
#93. Time constricts and flattens, you know. It's not evenly weighted. Certain moments linger in the mind and others disappear.
Christina Baker Kline
#95. Eighty-two years later, the sound of her crying still haunts me. If only I had paid closer attention to why she was crying instead of simply trying to quiet her. If only I had paid closer attention.
Christina Baker Kline
#96. Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles. Vivian
Christina Baker Kline
#97. Richard knows a bar that's open until two and they go off in search of it, the two girls tottering on their heels and swaying against the men, who seem all too happy to support them.
Christina Baker Kline
#98. There were over thirty thousand Wabanakis living on the East Coast in 1600 and that 90 percent of them had died by 1620, almost entirely a result of contact with settlers, who brought foreign diseases and alcohol, drained resources, and fought with the tribes for control of the land.
Christina Baker Kline
#99. What I couldn't see is that sometimes the healing is not in the forgetting but in the letting go.
Christina Baker Kline
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