Things You Save in a Fire Quotes

“Choosing to love—despite all the ways that people let you down, and disappear, and break your heart. Knowing everything we know about how hard life is and choosing to love, anyway.. That’s not weakness, that’s courage.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“It’s not the easy moments that define who we are. It’s the hard ones.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“It's amazing how brave you can be when you feel safe.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“That’s the thing I always love best about the human race: How we pick ourselves back up over and over and just keep on going.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“If you play it right, your struggles might even lead you to your strengths.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“I’m at my very best when things are at their very worst.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn't to never feel hope, or bliss, or love-but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“I had told my story. I had put it into words, at last... Telling the story changed the story for me. Not what had happened--that I could never change--but how I responded to it.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“Forgiveness is about a mind-set of letting go.” She thought for a second, then said, “It’s about acknowledging to yourself that someone hurt you, and accepting that.” Done, I thought. “Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened. Flawed, I thought. Okay. Check. “And then there’s a third part,” she went on, “probably the hardest, that involves trying to look at the aftermath of what happened and find ways that you benefited, not just ways you were harmed.” I”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“Maybe nobody got a happy ending in the end. Maybe all happiness could ever hope to be was a tiny interruption from sorrow.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“Good things didn’t last, people hurt each other every day, and nobody got a happy ending. But that night with him made me see it all in a new way. All the hardships and insults and disappointments in life didn’t make this one blissful moment less important. They made it more. They made it matter. The very fact that it couldn’t last was the reason to hold on to it—however we could. Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn’t to never feel hope, or bliss, or love—but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came. The answer wasn’t to never love anyone. It was to love like crazy whenever you could.”
― Katherine Center , Things You Save in a Fire

“And it's a girl. And you will love her more than you love yourself. And you'll disappoint her, too—and never live up to the standards you set for yourself. But don't worry. She'll be okay.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“I wanted to grab onto him like a life preserver in an empty ocean.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“As if you don’t always lose by definition when you push the people who love you away.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“It did feel good to get out. The wind. The ocean. The stars. The universe. I was surprised how soothing it was to be in the presence of things greater than myself.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“SAYING YES CHANGED everything. When you are all about saying no, one yes is a big deal.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“I knew too much about life to pretend that it wasn’t half tragedy. We lose the people we love. We disappoint each other. We misunderstand. We get lost and lonely and angry. But right now, in this moment, we were okay.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“That's just the human condition, sweetheart. We're always doomed to waste our time.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“You let your grief make you bitter. You let your suffering make you cruel. Want to know what that makes you? A villain. That's every comic book villain ever! They suffer, and then they inflict suffering on others. Good guys do the opposite. Good guys suffer, too - but they respond by helping.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“the way he was. The expression on his face when he looked at me always seemed to be some version of admiration. The things I was good at—he saw them. He wasn’t competing with me, either. He didn’t mind when I was better than him, and he seemed to love it when I was better than the other guys. I just always had this feeling that he was rooting for me.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“It takes guts to walk into a burning building or staunch an arterial bleed—no question. But it also takes a special kind of brain. Firefighters think differently from other people, and this is especially true of me. Because when everybody else is panicking, when the entire whole world is freaking the heck out—that’s when I get calm.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“Human connection had its upsides, but it sure was a lot of work. The risk-reward ratio was low, at best.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“Things happen. Lives get broken. Some people never can put themselves back together.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“Ten years I'd simmered in my own self-righteousness, holding my grudge against her as if the only way to win was to stay mad the longest.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“It’s a big deal to share your grief with other people—to give them a glimpse of the pain you carry.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“The answer wasn’t to never love anyone. It was to love like crazy whenever you could.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“Forgiveness is about a mind-set of letting go.” She thought for a second, then said, “It’s about acknowledging to yourself that someone hurt you, and accepting that.” Done, I thought. “Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“They will ignore you. They will exclude you. They will resent you. Being nice won’t help. Working hard won’t matter. Just by your very presence there, you are attacking them, trying to steal something that’s rightfully theirs, trying to infiltrate and dismantle their brotherhood.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“The more connection I got, the more I wanted. You know, like when you take a nap, but when you wake up you’re somehow sleepier than you were before? That was me, all the time—with humanity.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

“I do it because I believe that human connection is the only thing that will save us. I do it because I believe we learn empathy when we listen to other people’s stories and feel their pain with them. I do it because I know for certain that our world has an empathy problem with women, and this is one brave thing I can do to help fix it.”
― Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire