Christina Baker Kline Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“I love you," he writes again and again. "I can't bear to live without you. I'm counting the minutes until I see you." The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less cliched. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe.”

— Christina Baker Kline

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

“Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced. Father dead. Mother off the deep end. Shuttled around and rejected time and time again. And still she breathes and sleeps and grows taller. She wakes up every morning and puts on clothes. So when she says it's okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion, you didn't anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps to make sense of what happened.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“Upright and do right make all right.”

— Christina Baker Kline

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

“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

“My parents are a bedrock. And I have three complex, strong, and funny sisters who inspire and sustain me.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“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

“For years I'd understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“Having the book-club army embrace you is a gift that keeps giving for years.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“I often work and write in coffee shops, observing the baristas and eavesdropping on interesting conversations.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“My mother was one of the most dynamic and brilliant women I have ever known. She was also mercurial and unfocused.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“Words are both my vocation and my avocation - reading, writing, editing, teaching.”

— Christina Baker Kline

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

“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

“As with Dutchy and Carmine on the train, this little cluster of women has become a kind of family to me. Like an abandoned foal that nestles against cows in the barnyard, maybe I just need to feel the warmth of belonging. And if I'm not going to find that with the Byrnes, I will find it, however partial and illusory, with the women in the sewing room.”

— Christina Baker Kline

Every decision I make is determined solely by the spark and limitations of my own perspective

— Christina Baker Kline

“Remember: eye contact," he says. "And be sure to smile."
"You are such a mom."
"You know what your problem is?"
"That my boyfriend is acting like a mom?”

— Christina Baker Kline

“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

“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

“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

“That the quickest relief will come in forgetting.”

— Christina Baker Kline

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

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

The stark gray sky and bare tree limbs feel more suited to her than the uncomplicated promise of sunny spring days.

— Christina Baker Kline

“Test your limits. Learn what you can endure.”

— Christina Baker Kline

Know what a symbol is? ... Shit that stands for shit.

— Christina Baker Kline

And anyway, how do you talk about losing everything?

— Christina Baker Kline

“ORPHAN TRAIN is a specifically American story of mobility and rootlessness, highlighting a little-known but historically significant moment in our country's past. Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains transported more than two hundred thousand orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children-many”

— Christina Baker Kline

“Despite the landlord's disapproval, the sweltering heat, the gloomy rooms, and the cacophony of strange noises, so unfamiliar to my country ears, I felt another swell of hope. As I looked around our four rooms, it did seem that we were off to a fresh start, having left behind the many hardships of life in Kinvara: the damp that sank into our bones, the miserable, cramped hut, our father's drinking-did I mention that?-that threw every small gain into peril. Here, our da had the promise of a job. We could pull a chain for light; the twist of a knob brought running water. Just outside the door, in a dry hallway, a toilet and bathtub. However modest, this was a chance for a new beginning.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“Servants, men in top hats and morning coats, shop girls in”

— Christina Baker Kline

“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

“I can't imagine why you didn't memorize this route on the”

— Christina Baker Kline

“I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display”

— Christina Baker Kline

“If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead.”

— Christina Baker Kline

“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

“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

“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

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

The people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments.

— Christina Baker Kline

“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

“Story. (And anyway, Lori doesn't ask "why" questions. She's only”

— Christina Baker Kline

“And even if she loses the charms, she thinks, they'll always be a part of her. The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin. People get tattoos to have a permanent reminder of things they love or believe or fear, but though she'll never regret the turtle, she has no need to ink her flesh again to remember the past. She had not known the markings would be etched so deep. A”

— Christina Baker Kline

“Stracciatella alla Romana 8 cups chicken broth, preferably homemade 6 ounces fresh spinach, cut into strips 4 eggs, plus 2 tablespoons water ½ cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese Salt and pepper Boil the stock and add spinach, cooking until wilted, about 3 minutes. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs with the water; add grated cheese. Whisk the egg mixture briskly into the boiling broth, and add salt and pepper to taste, then serve.”

— Christina Baker Kline

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

“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