Top 35 Abigail Thomas Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Shopping is hope.”

— Abigail Thomas

2. “Good things happen slowly and bad things happen fast. Those were comforting words, and they comfort me today.”

— Abigail Thomas

3. “Maybe there are clusters of souls born again and again into the same repertory company, and with each new birth they play different parts in a different play. Or maybe it’s the same play. This would account for those moments of Oh! there you are! After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.”

— Abigail Thomas

4. “Love Love can accommodate all sorts of misshapen objects: a door held open for a city dog who runs into the woods; fences down; some role you didn’t ask for, didn’t want. Love allows for betrayal and loss and dread. Love is roomy. Love can change its shape, be known by different names. Love is elastic. And the dog comes back.”

— Abigail Thomas

5. “Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn’t work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might;.”

— Abigail Thomas

6. “A couple of years ago my sister Judy and I were each given a box of truffles. The tiny print said two pieces contained 310 calories and there were six pieces in each box. We were sitting on the bus headed downtown, quietly doing our calculations: Judy was dividing by two and I was multiplying by three. When she realized what I was doing, a look came over her face that is hard to describe. ‘I lost all hope for you’ she says now.”

— Abigail Thomas

7. “If you were to look into our apartment in the late morning, or early afternoon, or toward suppertime, you might find us together sleeping. Of course a good rainy day is preferable, but even on sunny summer days, the dogs and I get into bed.”

— Abigail Thomas

8. “Yesterday in his hospital room my husband asked urgently, “Will you move me twenty-six thousand miles to the left?“”Yes,” I said, not moving from my chair. After a moment he said, “Thank you,” adding in wonder, “I didn’t feel a thing.”

— Abigail Thomas

9. “Here’s what I love about dogs. They aren’t careful not to disturb you. They don’t overthink. They jump on the bed or the sofa or the chair and plop down. They come and they go. I’m not sure they love me exactly, but they count on me because I am a source of heat and food and pleasure and affection. If one of them is lying next to me and suddenly prefers the sofa, I don’t take it personally. Dogs don’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed. There is no wrong side of the bed for a dog.”

— Abigail Thomas

10. “Dogs are never in a bad mood over something you said at breakfast. Dogs never sniff at the husks of old conversations, or conduct autopsies on weekends gone wrong. An unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is hell. We talk too much.”

— Abigail Thomas

11. “Forget career, forget the future, forget existential worries, just get yourselves a couple of dogs, and everything will be all right.”

— Abigail Thomas

12. “It was a long time before I realized that you don’t have to start right, you just have to start. Put pen to paper, allow yourself the freedom to write badly, to get it wrong, stop looking over your own shoulder.”

— Abigail Thomas

13. “What can come? This was a brilliant question. Can is scarier than will. What will come limits itself. What can come has no boundaries.”

— Abigail Thomas

14. “Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong?”

— Abigail Thomas

15. “This would account for those moments of Oh! there you are! After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.”

— Abigail Thomas

16. “But we don’t get to choose what sticks. How many times I have run my fingers along a picket fence and thought, “This! I will remember this moment always!” and all that remains is the memory of a desire to hold on to a memory.”

— Abigail Thomas

17. “He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It’s too late for either of us to make another old friend.”

— Abigail Thomas

18. “Happy,” for instance, once meant “luck.” Not good luck or bad, just luck. Look what we have done to ourselves. We think we can actually pursue happiness.”

— Abigail Thomas

19. “The connection with him is a connection with part of myself, and it has to do with a kind of insatiable curiosity. I mean the part of me that gets connected to the rest of me when I’m connecting to him. The insatiably curious part.”

— Abigail Thomas

20. “I used to get upset if somebody I didn’t like loved a book I loved. That’s MY book, I’d think.”

— Abigail Thomas

21. “There are three things that make me want to drink: difficult times, when I want alcohol to either alleviate the pain or allow me to feel it; clear days that make me want to scribble all over the irritating blue sky; and well, waking up in the morning.”

— Abigail Thomas

22. “There’s nothing I want to relive – certainly not youth – and as for what’s to come, I’m in no hurry. I watch my dogs. They throw themselves into everything they do; even their sleeping is wholehearted. They aren’t waiting for a better tomorrow, or looking back at their glory days. Following their example, I’m trying to stick to the present. I’m not stranded here, I know where I’ve been; I can conjure up details of old haunts, even former states of mind.”

— Abigail Thomas

23. “Here’s what I love about dogs. They aren’t careful not to disturb you. They don’t overthink. They jump on the bed or the sofa or the chair and plop down. They come and they go. I’m not sure they love me exactly, but they count on me because I am a source of heat and food and pleasure and affection.”

— Abigail Thomas

24. “It ended sadly. The kind of ending where you wait together, holding hands and weeping, while off in another room, love slowly dies.”

— Abigail Thomas

25. “I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes.”

— Abigail Thomas

26. “It’s easy now – it’s middle-aged lady, nobody’s looking, nobody notices. I go without lipstick if I feel like it, and I always wear my comfy clothes. It’s a life with fewer distractions, but should something beautiful show up, a middle-aged woman is free to stare.”

— Abigail Thomas

27. “I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.”

— Abigail Thomas

28. “Suffering is the finest teacher”, said an old friend long ago. “It teaches you details.”

— Abigail Thomas

29. “The process is a lot like writing. You start with a wisp of memory, or some detail that won’t let you be. You write, you cross out. You write again, revise, feel like giving up. What pulls you through? Curiosity.”

— Abigail Thomas

30. “I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It’s somebody else’s turn now.”

— Abigail Thomas

31. “Anger is a luxury. Anger wants answers, retribution, reason, something that makes sense. Anger wants a story, stories help us make sense out of everything. But while we scramble to help those who need it, who has time for anger? Who has time to make sense out of anything? There is only what is. Anger is a distraction. Anger removes me from grief, and the opportunity to be helpful.”

— Abigail Thomas

32. “What can come?” my grandson Sam asked, when he was very young, after his mother had warned him not to go into the woods after dark. What can come? This was a brilliant question. Can is scarier than will. What will come limits itself. What can come has no boundaries.”

— Abigail Thomas

33. “Grief is not a pleasure, but it makes me remember, and I am grateful.”

— Abigail Thomas

34. “But when it gets dark, I’m off the hook. The day is officially rolled up and put away. I’m free to watch movies or stare at the wall, no longer holding myself accountable for what I might or might not have gotten done because the time for getting something done is over until tomorrow.”

— Abigail Thomas

35. “I used to lie in a lover’s arms getting a stiff neck, or needing to scratch my nose, or losing all sensation in my arm, unwilling to move lest the man find out I wasn’t comfortable in his embrace... Would Snow White have rested all eight pounds of her head on any part of the prince? I doubt it, and I never did either. Sarah says that is why elderly women have such prominent cords in their necks.”

— Abigail Thomas

36. “Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world.”

— Abigail Thomas