Life & Wisdom Quote by Kate DiCamillo

“I think of myself as an enormously lucky person” is the kind of sentence that looks modest until you notice how carefully it’s built. DiCamillo doesn’t say she’s successful, talented, or even happy. She chooses “lucky,” a word that shifts credit away from individual genius and toward the messy ecology that makes a life in books possible: timing, teachers, librarians, health, a reader who needed the story on the right day.

The “I think of myself” matters, too. It frames luck as a practiced perspective, not an objective scoreboard. In a culture that rewards relentless self-mythmaking, DiCamillo opts for an inner stance: gratitude as a deliberate narrative choice. The adverb “enormously” adds a childlike plainness that feels true to her work. It’s not a coy understatement; it’s a big, clean emphasis, the way children talk when they’re trying to be exact about something felt rather than measured.

Context deepens the line’s quiet force. DiCamillo’s public biography often includes real vulnerability: chronic illness as a child, economic uncertainty, the long, unglamorous apprenticeship of writing. “Lucky” becomes a reframing of hardship without denying it. It also acts as a subtle rebuke to the meritocracy story that dominates the arts: if luck is central, then the industry’s gatekeeping and randomness are exposed, and the moral obligation shifts outward. Gratitude, here, isn’t just personal warmth; it’s an ethic of attention to the unseen hands behind any “individual” career.