Top 40 A.M. Homes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I believe in staying open to possibility. What is the point of not believing, closing the door? Just leave it open, see what comes in.”

— A.M. Homes

2. “I’m feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt.”

— A.M. Homes

3. “Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better – does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?”

— A.M. Homes

4. “If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.”

— A.M. Homes

5. “I don’t know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?”

— A.M. Homes

6. “People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.”

— A.M. Homes

7. “Birthday parties make me nervous as hell. They’re one of those things where you’re forced to be happy. And even if you’re totally depressed, you’re got to pretend you’re glad you were born, regardless of the fact that getting older means you’re closer to dying.”

— A.M. Homes

8. “I’m nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.”

— A.M. Homes

9. “I am very interested in loyalty, even if the person to whom one is loyal is flawed, criminal, or otherwise in the wrong.”

— A.M. Homes

10. “Suffering is normal. Pain is normal, it is part of life... What is its texture, the weight of our suffering? What is its meaning? Begin by touching it, by coming close to it, accepting it: Hello, suffering, I am here with you. I am beside you, one with you, I am you. I am suffering.”

— A.M. Homes

11. “I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There’s an accuracy to fiction that people don’t really talk about – an emotional accuracy.”

— A.M. Homes

12. “She savors each bite: the meringue is perfect crispy brown on top, melts in the mouth; the lemon tart, custardy; the crust breaks away.”

— A.M. Homes

13. “It’s a strange city... filled with things that are not obvious.”

— A.M. Homes

14. “Sometimes you can do things for others that you can’t do for yourself.”

— A.M. Homes

15. “The strange days of summer. There is no here, no there, the days are incredibly still, the light is brightly muted – it’s hard to know if that’s the passing of the season or poor air quality.”

— A.M. Homes

16. “A lot of people get flipped out if you’re quiet. They say stuff like, What are you thinking? And if they don’t start interrogating you, they start talking, going on and on about stuff that’s totally irrelevant, and the silence gets so big and loud that it’s scary.”

— A.M. Homes

17. “A guy rubbed against me,” I say. “But I think he was just trying to get by. He rubbed me, then said sorry. It was the ‘sorry’ that made me uncomfortable. The rub was kind of interesting, but when he apologized I felt like a creep because I actually liked it.”

— A.M. Homes

18. “Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.”

— A.M. Homes

19. “It’s my policy not to review funerals.”

— A.M. Homes

20. “I grew up convinced that every family was better than mine. I grew up watching other families in awe, hardly able to bear the sensations, the nearly pornographic pleasure of witnessing such small intimacies. I would hover on the edge, knowing that however much they include you – invite you to dinner, take you on family trips – you are never official, you are always the “friend,” the first one left behind.”

— A.M. Homes

21. “I made myself a Muenster-cheese sandwich, with lettuce, tomato, mustard, and mayo, and went up to my room. Ingredients are important.”

— A.M. Homes

22. “How can I tell anyone that there has always lived within me a rusty sense of disgust-a dull, brackish water that I suspect is my soul?”

— A.M. Homes

23. “They stood there, staring at each other, swelling up the whole room. I remember the sudden strange sensation that these were not my parents, these were not the same people I’d known last week.”

— A.M. Homes

24. “Alice, I hand you her name gently, suggesting that if you hold it, carefully as I do, pressed close to the heart, you might at the end of this understand how confusing the beating of two such similar hearts can be and how one finally had to stop.”

— A.M. Homes

25. “There’s something excruciating about this part. Strangers, or, even worse, friends, crouch at the children’s knees, touching them, hugging them, stressed faces one after another pressing into theirs, faces like caricatures. There is the awkwardness of people feeling the need to say something when there is nothing to say. Nothing.”

— A.M. Homes

26. “He lay there realizing how thoroughly he’d removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he’d become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not a part of anyone’s life. He’d so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn’t sure he still existed.”

— A.M. Homes

27. “The harder it gets to be safe and secure, to trust, to find love and understanding – the more you feel entitled, allowed, even encouraged, to cheat, to lie, to steal, and then later, even to kill. That you are just beginning to feel it now only means you have been lucky for too long.”

— A.M. Homes

28. “Make the mental physical, and the physical mental, and things will improve.”

— A.M. Homes

29. “You can’t collect everything,” Pat says, putting the dress in with the giveaways. “Life is not a hobby.”

— A.M. Homes

30. “Anhil’s coffee was hot, dark, full-flavored, perfect chasing the equally well-turned donut: golden brown, dense without being leaden, not too sweet.”

— A.M. Homes

31. “I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They’re four or five years long – that’s not so bad. They’re serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who’s not so crazy and peculiar and demanding.”

— A.M. Homes

32. “I nodded. It was his checklist. Every time we were together we went through this. He ran down his list of people, events, even actual objects that were in my life.”

— A.M. Homes

33. “It annoys the hell out of me when people say, This is the kitchen, and this is the bathroom. What am I, Helen Keller? I mean, it’s pretty obvious when you’re in a kitchen and when you’re not.”

— A.M. Homes

34. “He looked at Richard and the donut with great intensity, as if this were the donut that would fix Richard, as if there were certain donuts that were better for certain ailments, as if a donut could have curative powers.”

— A.M. Homes

35. “I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.”

— A.M. Homes

36. “I am an amalgam. I will always be something glued together, something slightly broken. It is not something I might recover from but something I must accept, to live with- with compassion.”

— A.M. Homes

37. “It is the kind of day that farmers, when there were still farmers, would have dreamed of. The sky is brilliant blue, the plants are newly green, the air as fresh and clean as though it has been washed, tumbled dry, and neatly folded the night before. It is the kind of day you never forget.”

— A.M. Homes

38. “Even though I thought I wouldn’t – could never – I do enjoy looking at him. It is like seeing one’s self, like seeing one’s self with a certain sense of remove.”

— A.M. Homes

39. “I don’t want to be one of those women who says horrible things about her husband, but your father had no right to take the hammer. I had that hammer when we were still dating, and he damn well knew it.”

— A.M. Homes

40. “There are strangers, people we don’t know, who care about is.”

— A.M. Homes

41. “One wants to believe that there are systems in place that protect us; but, in fact, we are all a little more on our own than one might realize.”

— A.M. Homes

42. “If I’m hearing you right,” the judge says, “what you’re outlining is a coup of sorts that will sweep across this country largely unnoticed until it is too late – until the American people have been decimated economically, intellectually, and spiritually. It comes together on a decision day that results in the emergence of a new America.” “Yes,” the Big Guy says. “And no one will read it as an inside job. It’s a new American dream.”

— A.M. Homes