Top 100 Christina Baker Kline Quotes
#4. Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.
Christina Baker Kline
#5. And so it is that you learn how to pass, if you're lucky, to look like everyone else, even though you're broken inside.
Christina Baker Kline
#6. Without even thinking about it, my son uses technology in almost everything he does, large and small.
Christina Baker Kline
#7. This isn't bickering. This is classic mother-daughter communications. I've been reading up on it.
Christina Baker Kline
#9. She has learned that she can control her emotions by thinking of her chest cavity as an enormous box with a chain lock. She opens the box and stuffs in any stray unmanageable feelings, any wayward sadness or regret, and clamps it shut.
Christina Baker Kline
#10. My mother was one of the most dynamic and brilliant women I have ever known. She was also mercurial and unfocused.
Christina Baker Kline
#12. 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
#13. Something in his manner makes me want to confide things to him I've never told anyone. Even painful things, shameful things. I didn't know how badly I wanted to share them.
Christina Baker Kline
#15. Hardcovers will never completely disappear. They are delightful to hold; they feel weighty and substantial. But my anecdotal evidence suggests that the world is changing.
Christina Baker Kline
#16. This is like telling a person who has leapt off a cliff to be careful. I am already in midair.
Christina Baker Kline
#17. 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
#19. In my ideal world, my next novel would have a first printing of, say, 2,500 hardcovers for reviewers, libraries, collectors, and autograph hounds. The publisher could print more copies if they get low. And simultaneously, or six weeks later, the book would be available in paperback.
Christina Baker Kline
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. So I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display empathy I do not feel. I am learning to pass, to look like everyone else, even though I feel broken inside.
Christina Baker Kline
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Irish lace, hanging in the windows, filters the afternoon light, softening the lines on her face.
Christina Baker Kline
#26. I have found that the biggest moments in life, the ones that change everything, usually catch you by surprise.
Christina Baker Kline
#27. 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
#28. Sometimes these spirits have been more real to me than people, more real than God. They fill silence with their weight, dense and warm, like bread dough rising under cloth.
Christina Baker Kline
#29. My parents are a bedrock. And I have three complex, strong, and funny sisters who inspire and sustain me.
Christina Baker Kline
#31. I've come to think that's what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.
Christina Baker Kline
#34. 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
#36. As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.
Christina Baker Kline
#37. How strange, I think - that I am in a place my parents have never been and will never see. How strange that I am here and they are gone.
Christina Baker Kline
#38. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. 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
#44. The stark gray sky and bare tree limbs feel more suited to her than the uncomplicated promise of sunny spring days.
Christina Baker Kline
#45. You can't find peace until you find all the pieces. She wants to help Vivian find some kind of peace, elusive and fleeting as it may be.
Christina Baker Kline
#46. He squints at me. "Except for the red hair and freckles, you look okay. You'll be fine and dandy sitting at the table with a napkin on your lap.
Christina Baker Kline
#47. Words are both my vocation and my avocation - reading, writing, editing, teaching.
Christina Baker Kline
#48. I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best, and we should all just be kind to each other.
Christina Baker Kline
#49. And I know, with the newfuond clarity of being in a relationship myself, that my own parents were never happy together, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstances
Christina Baker Kline
#50. made it through this year because I had to, because I had no options. But now that I've experienced comfort and safety, how can I go back? These thoughts take me to the edge of despair, so I will myself - I force myself - not to have them.
Christina Baker Kline
#51. Radiation is relentless: my protocol is five days a week, 33 sessions altogether.
Christina Baker Kline
#52. It?" "Friday, April fourth, ma'am." She coughs. Then she doubles over and coughs
Christina Baker Kline
#55. When I was seventeen I went to college to escape my father's impotent rage and my mother's infinite capacity for forgiveness.
Christina Baker Kline
#56. It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.
Christina Baker Kline
#57. I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort. It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn't.
Christina Baker Kline
#58. 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
#59. I want to say, Christina, that you are ... unusual. And somehow..." her voice trails off. "Your mind-- your curiosity-- will be your comfort.
Christina Baker Kline
#63. What's the best thing that happened to you in the past ten years?" I ask. "Seeing you again." Smiling, I push back against his chest. "Besides that." "Meeting you the first time.
Christina Baker Kline
#64. 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
#65. The reading part of her feels private, between her and the characters in a book.
Christina Baker Kline
#69. I think of these qualities as metaphorical, you know? So black magic is whatever leads people to the dark side - their own greed or insecurity that makes them do destructive things.
Christina Baker Kline
#70. What she wants most - what she truly yearns for - is what any of us want: to be seen.
Christina Baker Kline
#71. 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
#72. I did love him. But I did not love him like I loved Dutchy: beyond reason. Maybe you only get one of those in a lifetime, I don't know. But it was all right. It was enough.
Christina Baker Kline
#73. 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
#74. I have been so alone on this journey, cut off from my past. However hard I try, I will always feel alien and strange. And now I've stumbled on a fellow outsider, one who speaks my language without saying a word.
Christina Baker Kline
#75. Many people, for many reasons, feel rootless - but orphans and abandoned or abused children have particular cause.
Christina Baker Kline
#76. 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
#79. I think of what Mamey told me long ago: there are many ways to love and be loved. Too bad it's taken most of a lifetime for me to understand what that means.
Christina Baker Kline
#80. 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
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Maybe it doesn't matter how much gets done. Maybe the value is in the process - in touching each item, in naming and identifying, in acknowledging the significance of a cardigan, a pair of children's boots. "It's
Christina Baker Kline
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. It's painful to hold out hope for the things that once brought you joy. You have to find ways to make yourself forget.
Christina Baker Kline
#93. 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
#95. 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
#96. The twists and turns of your life can be so unexpected, and that's a good thing to learn.
Christina Baker Kline
#98. 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
#99. Look, I don't mean to be rude, but you could never have a normal life, even if that's what you thought you wanted. You and me, we're not 'normal.
Christina Baker Kline
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