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Katherine May Quotes

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Famous Katherine May Quotes

“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.”

Wintering
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“In moments of helplessness, I always seem to travel north. I have a kind of boreal wanderlust, an urge towards the top of the world where the ice intrudes. In the cold, I find I can think straight; the air feels clean and uncluttered. I have faith in the practicality of the north, its ability to prepare and endure, the peaks and troughs of its seasons.”

TravelWintering
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“I spend the morning in the local grocers, bringing in the Christmas provisions: Stilton, ham, Brussels sprouts, a capon of terrifying dimensions. Unfathomable quantities of potatoes. Red wine and white, a bottle of Marsala. Turkish delight and cherry liqueur chocolates. A bag of satsumas, some wrapped in blue and gold paper. Several pots of cream, just in case.”

FoodChristmasWintering
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“I gained something new: a welcome sense of insignificance amid a congregation of people; a lifting of the obligation to endlessly do, if just for an hour; a gentle truce with myself. I spent most of that time on the verge of tears. I needed to do no more than open up that tiny space to see how black it all was.”

ReligionWintering
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“I have always been that figure, reaching up towards impossible things. Today I am sick with those desires, trying to channel the infernal patience of parenthood while a dozen stories ball up in my throat, unable to be written. I’m scared that it might be forever, that one obstacle after another will prevent me from making the work I need to make in order to stay sane.”

DreamsWintering
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“Gazing back at the water, I felt the urge to do it all over again, to go back and exist in those crystalline seconds of intense cold. My blood sparkled in my veins. I was certain that I could conquer it a second time around, could tolerate a little longer in that frozen claw. “That was brilliant,” I gasped.”

SwimmingWintering
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“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

ResilienceWintering
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“Winter is when I reorganise my bookshelves and read all the books I acquired in the previous year and failed to actually read. It is also the time when I reread beloved novels, for the pleasure of reacquainting myself with old friends. In summer, I want big, splashy ideas and trashy page-turners, devoured while lounging in a garden chair or perching on one of the breakwaters on the beach. In winter, I want concepts to chew over in a pool of lamplight—slow, spiritual reading, a reinforcement of the soul. Winter is a time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all.”

ReadingBooksWintering
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“To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it’s happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will often come around again. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. In the meantime, we can deal only with what’s in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.”

TimeWintering
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“In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts makes a case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget: that life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. Our suffering, he says, comes from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth.”

LifeWintering
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“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. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”

Mental HealthWintering
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“We must emerge slowly from our wintering. We must test the air and be ready to shrink back into safety when blasted by unseasonal winds; we must gradually unfurl our new leaves. There will still be the debris of a long, disordered season. These are the moments when we have to find the most grace: when we come to atone for the worst ravages of our conduct in darker times, when we have to tell truths that we’d rather ignore. Sometimes we will have to name our personal winters, and the words will feel barbed in our throats: grief, rejection, depression, illness. Shame, failure, despair.”

Wintering
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“This has been a long journey for me, and swimming is just one of the changes I’ve made. I’ve cut out sugar, I make sure I get plenty of alone time, I go on long walks, and I’ve stopped saying yes to everybody. I’ve cut down my working hours. All of these things make a buffer, and I say I like to keep my buffer broad. Sometimes problems come up that narrow my buffer, and then I have to make sure I build it up again. Keeping well is almost a full-time job. But I have a wonderful life.”

Mental HealthWintering
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“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. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.”

ResilienceWintering
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“I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery, or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it; but I do think it’s instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that something is going wrong. If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt. We seem to be living in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression; we’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, and yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding high, and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective.”

ResilienceWintering
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“Nature shows that survival is a practice. Sometimes it flourishes---lays on flat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey---and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn't do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. It attends to this work each and every day. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans. To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it's happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will one day be past history. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. But one things is certain: we will simply have new things to worry about. We will have to clench our teeth and carry on surviving again. In the meantime, we can deal only with what's in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.”

Wintering
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“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. Somewhere else is where ghosts live concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world, somewhere else exists at a delay so that you can’t quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already on the brink of somewhere else anyway.”

Wintering
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“But if happiness is a skill than sadness is too. Pephaps through all those years at school or perhaps through other terrors we are taught to ignore it, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. as adults we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can.”

Wintering
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“I have cut out sugar, I make sure I get plenty of alone time, I go on long walks and I’ve stopped saying yes to everybody. I’ve cut down my working hours. All of these things make a buffer and I say I like to keep my buffer broad. Sometimes problems come up that narrow my buffer and then I have to make sure I build it up again. Keeping well is almost a full-time job but I have a wonderful life.”

Wintering
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“As I walk, I remind myself of the words of Alan Watts: “To hold your breath is to lose your breath”. In the wisdom of insecurity what makes a case that always convinces me but which I always seem to forget that life is by nature uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security somehow and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless unpredictable change. That is the very essence of this life.”

Wintering
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“Sometimes the best response to our house of anguish is the honest one: we need friends who winter along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom and who allow us to be weak for a while while we’re finding our feet again. We need people to acknowledge that we can’t always hang on in there. That sometimes everything breaks.”

Wintering
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“I don't know what's wrong with me, really. It's nothing, but it's also all-encompassing. I feel strangely empty, devoid of though and energy. I am not sure where my days go, but they go. Every single thing I must do--any hint of a demand--grinds against me. I don't know what I'd do in that time should I ever achieve that perfect aloneness. I like to think I would read, but in truth I would probably sleep. I don't have the attention for anything, really. My brain feels entirely separate from me. It is empty, but it also cannot take any more in. It seems that it's a useless organ, endlessly refusing to notice what I want it to notice. It will not engage. It just glances off everything, a pale beam.”

ExhaustionBrain Power
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“/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 contemplation. It’s also a moment when I have to walk away from all the alliances, to let the strings of some friendships fall loose, if only for a while. It’s a pathway walked over and over again in my life. I have learned the skill set of wintering the hard way.”

Overcoming Depression
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“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. Perhaps it results from an illness or life event such as bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporary falling between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. 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. But life‘s not like that.”

LostDepressionHopelessnessOut Of Place
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“Winter is a quiet house in lamplight, a spin the garden to see bright stars on a clear night, the roar of the wood-burning stove, and the accompanying smell of charred wood. It is warming the teapot and making cups of bitter cocoa; it is stews magicked from bones with dumplings floating like clouds. It is reading quietly and passing away the afternoon twilight watching movies. It is thick socks and the bundle of a cardigan.”

WinterWinter Quotes
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“We take off our shoes, or we turn on our ears. We press our hands together in a gesture of prayer, or we remember the full extent of our lungs. Perhaps we even arrange ourselves cross-legged on the ground, or perhaps we dance or walk or swim instead. When we want to escape the surface, we activate our bodies, and they show us a different intelligence, pointing to a mind that resides not just in the head. Our knowing is diffused throughout all of us, distributed through muscle and bone, pulsing through organs and conveyed in the blood. We put our feet to the ground to listen with all of it. Not all that we know is verbal. Much of it--sometimes I think the vast majority--is somatic, the concern of the body. I learned this most keenly when Bert was a baby, and I used to reach towards him in the back seat on long car journeys and feel his foot press into my palm in reply. There was communication there far beyond words, and far more soothing to both of us. When I used to sit him on my lap and kiss his soft head, I was aware that information was being exchanged between us, transmitted through my lips and received through my nose. I could not even tell you what it said. Our bodies have answers to questions that we don't know how to ask.”

CommunicationConnectionBodiesNonverbal Communication
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“More than any other season, winter requires a kind of metronome that ticks away its darkest beats, giving us a melody to follow into spring. The year will move on no matter what, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition—perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year—we can get the measure of it.”

WinterTransitions In LifeRhythm Of Living
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“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. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can't quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting through the floorboards. I was surprised that I felt at home there. Winter had begun.”

Life Advise
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“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. But life's not like that. Emotionally, we're prone to stifling summers and low, dark winters, to sudden drops in temperature, to light and shade. Even if by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck we were able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime, we still couldn't avoid the winter. Our parents would age and die; our friends would undertake minor acts of betrayal; the machinations of the world would eventually weigh against us. Somewhere along the line, we would screw up. Winter would quietly roll in.”

MistakesEmotional LifeImpefection
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“Watching winter and really listening to its messages, we learn that effect is often disproportionate to cause; that tiny mistakes can lead to huge disasters; that life is often bloody unfair, but it carries on happening with our without our consent. We learn to look more kindly on other people's crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.”

MistakesCause And EffectLife Goes OnLife Is Unfair
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“I recognized winter. I saw it coming (a mile off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. 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 favored child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”

FaithSleepWinterNutritionSelf CareRestWintering
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“Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness—one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights. In winter, we are invited into a particular mode of sleep: not a regimented eight hours, but a slow, ambulatory process in which waking thoughts merge with dreams, and space is made in the blackest hours to repair the fragmented narratives of our days.”

SleepWintering
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“Before the Industrial Revolution, it was normal to divide the night into two periods of sleep: the “first sleep,” or “dead sleep,” lasting from the evening until the early hours of the morning; and the “second” or “morning” sleep, which took the slumberer safely to daybreak. In between, there was an hour or more of wakefulness known as the “watch,” in which “Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors. Many others made love, prayed, and . . . reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness.” In the intimacy of the darkness, families and lovers could hold deep, rich, wandering conversations that had no place in the busy daytime.”

SleepWintering
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“Halloween is no longer a time for remembrance, but it still reveals or need to enter liminal spaces: those moments when we're standing on the boundary between fear and delight, and those times when we wish that the veil between the living and the dead would lift for a while. But most of all, it hints at the winter to come, opening the door to the dark season, and reminding us of the darknesses that lurk in all our futures.”

DeathFearDarknessHalloween
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“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. I hate those strange walks along the high street, lit only by street lamps and the glow of shop windows, the cold seeping up your coat sleeves. I don’t like the way that 4 o’clock can feel so desolate, the air damp without the corrective force of the sun./ The very thought of driving seems nightmarish – those impenetrable roads their edges uncertain; the dance you have to perform with the full beam, flicking it on and off, on and off. Far better to stay at home.”

DarknessWinterChange Of Seasons
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