Top 120 Adriana Trigiani Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “What I wouldn’t give to have known my father with my mother in love-together, you know, just the two of them, in the kitchen laughing, making a sandwich, or holding hands on the street, seeing my father open a car door for my other. The absence of those things are what makes you an orphan-it’s the ordinary everyday expressions of love you miss.”

— Adriana Trigiani

52. “I have held the following jobs: office temp, ticket seller in movie theatre, cook in restaurant, nanny, and phone installer at the Super Bowl in New Orleans.”

— Adriana Trigiani

53. “I’m writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it. Don’t be afraid to shake it up.”

— Adriana Trigiani

54. “I love actors and I love to create an environment where they feel safe to connect and thrive and try things, to fail and succeed and flourish and fly.”

— Adriana Trigiani

55. “Whever I came into the room, she’d light up, so happy to see me. No one ever in the course of my entire life was ever as happy to see me as she was. Looking back, now, I realize that you only ever need one person who lights up that way when you enter a room. One person is all it takes to give a kid confidence.”

— Adriana Trigiani

56. “Anything you ever make that matters takes a long time. Some artists never see their work in front of an audience, so for them 15 years is a blink of an eye. I am nothing but grateful.”

— Adriana Trigiani

57. “There is no greater purpose for art than to move you, to elevate your mood, to make you think, to remind you of places you have been or places you want to build. It does everything – nourishes the soul and lifts the spirits of the people.”

— Adriana Trigiani

58. “But what Mom never told me is that along the way, you find sisters, and they find you. Girls are cool that way.”

— Adriana Trigiani

59. “Italy, despite its earthiness and charm, can never be New Jersey. Here we value evolution and change; Italy, while it warms the heart, is a monument to the past. In America we change our rooms as often as our fashions. In Italy you’re likely to find throw pillows older than the Shroud of Turin. It’s just a different way to live.”

— Adriana Trigiani

60. “I loved him more than he loved me, and that is a bad place for a woman to be.”

— Adriana Trigiani

61. “A library is a home filled with our stories. On every shelf, we see ourselves, experience our collective conscious, describe our dreams and our great longing for times that have passed, the sterling moment of the present and the glorious future known only in our imaginations.”

— Adriana Trigiani

62. “Isn’t this the truth of any good mother? That in all of our lives. We worry only about those we brought into this world, regardless of whether they loved us back or treated us fairly or understood our shortcomings.”

— Adriana Trigiani

63. “I learned that I wasn’t happy. It’s a terrifying thing to admit. It puts everyone around you in a state of paralysis because they think that they are somehow responsible for your sadness and can fix it. Of course they cannot. I know happiness exists somewhere and if I knew where, I would go to it and claim it. I realize I have spent my life reacting to things and not initiating them.”

— Adriana Trigiani

64. “You never know when some small thing will lead to a big idea. Travel is very inspirational – but it’s in the ordinary that I find my themes of love and work and family.”

— Adriana Trigiani

65. “Nobody ever told me that motherhood was temporary. You think you have years and years with them, but the truth is, you don’t.”

— Adriana Trigiani

66. “Having a purpose is the little secret of the nonpretties. Something to do always beats something to look at.”

— Adriana Trigiani

67. “I don’t settle in any other area of my life when it comes to excellence, so why should I lower my standards when it comes to boys?”

— Adriana Trigiani

68. “The terrible things that happen to us in this life never make any sense when we’re in the middle of them, floundering, no end in sight. There is no rope to hang on to, it.”

— Adriana Trigiani

69. “I love rhinestones, faux jewelry.”

— Adriana Trigiani

70. “Whatever it is that you’re feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.”

— Adriana Trigiani

71. “You just do your best, and life will follow.”

— Adriana Trigiani

72. “Children need to see delight in the eyes of adults, if only to give them a sense that happiness is within reach, even when it isn’t. Adults should be full of possibility, so the children might develop a sense of adventure. Children should live with the confidence that they are loved. Love frees them to embrace adventure, to seek truth, and to take care of one another.”

— Adriana Trigiani

73. “Orphans have many parents.”

— Adriana Trigiani

74. “Two different things. Work is survival, and love sustains you. You have work anytime. But love? Not always.”

— Adriana Trigiani

75. “I’m very organized – and the best thing – when you love your work, you don’t mind putting in 15 hour days. It’s joyful.”

— Adriana Trigiani

76. “He’s a good-looking sap, and he knows it. He’s just exactly smart enough to know that he can only be important in a place where he has no competition.”

— Adriana Trigiani

77. “This is one of those times when explaining a feeling cannot measure up to actually having the feeling.”

— Adriana Trigiani

78. “But the most precious research to me came from the paperwork filed on behalf of my grandparents and great-grandfather. The ship’s manifest showed that they could read and write. I am still emotional when I look at those boxes checked yes.”

— Adriana Trigiani

79. “Women move through the world never knowing their power.”

— Adriana Trigiani

80. “Each poor immigrant girl had a plan in place to survive. Some had brothers or fathers for protection, others, young husbands; but for all of them, the first line of defense was their scissors.”

— Adriana Trigiani

81. “All your life you was one thing. And now you can be something else if you want! Somebody completely different. You can actually start yourself over from scratch. Turn yourself into what you have always wanted to be!”

— Adriana Trigiani

82. “Book clubs are the best thing that has happened to the world of publishing.”

— Adriana Trigiani

83. “There was an especially deep bond between the eldest and the youngest. Enza and Stella were the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, the bookends that held all the family stories from start to finish as well as the various shades and hues of personality and temperament.”

— Adriana Trigiani

84. “Money doesn’t have anything have anything to do with the magnificence of a person. It doesn’t. What matters is what you make. Whether it’s a cake for bingo night or a costume for a saint or a wall of water-whatever you pour into this life is what makes you rich.”

— Adriana Trigiani

85. “Did you ever find yourself in a place in life where you had committed to something, and you couldn’t make it work?”

— Adriana Trigiani

86. “For young fellows like them, the war was a chance to become men, to see the world and save it and return home as American citizens. It didn’t occur to either of them that lives would be lost, that the world they were to defend would shift under their feet and never be the same again. They only dreamed of the adventure.”

— Adriana Trigiani

87. “I take care of your children like the priceless jewels that they are and I don’t expect a thank-you for my efforts. You never have to worry about our kids because you know no harm will come to them in my care. Do you have any idea what a burden I have taken off your shoulders? The ability to relieve another human being of worry and anxiety is the single greatest act of love one can do for another and I do it for you.”

— Adriana Trigiani

88. “If there is one thing I hope my books do always and forever, its that they honor working people.”

— Adriana Trigiani

89. “A higher goal is always reached by overcoming fear.”

— Adriana Trigiani

90. “I have been a joy to live with all spring: Upbeat, warm and tender, uncomplicated, and loving. I am no trouble at all. You could press me into dough and make sugar cookies out of me, I’ve been so sweet.”

— Adriana Trigiani

91. “Giacomina had taught her daughter that you must dig constantly for meaning in the sorrow of this life, and that this sorrow must galvanize you, not define you.”

— Adriana Trigiani

92. “And when you clear away the cobwebs of the description of every job in the world, at the bottom of that job is service. It’s service. And I took that ethic and applied it to my writing craft.”

— Adriana Trigiani

93. “If a man walks in beauty, he will create, and when he creates, he prospers.”

— Adriana Trigiani

94. “Enza studied the photograph of her parents on their wedding day as if it were a map. In a sense it was, as they were creating a destination, a life together.”

— Adriana Trigiani

95. “How can you quantify the moment when a person laughs, or when they cry, when they feel? You can’t. It’s the human experience.”

— Adriana Trigiani

96. “The weight of what had transpired on this day finally settled on Ciro. This wasn’t really their home, and the nuns weren’t truly family. The security they had provided was only on loan.”

— Adriana Trigiani

97. “He encouraged us to reflect on the past. Make peace with it. You cannot control the evil done to you. You cannot turn back and right the good left undone.”

— Adriana Trigiani

98. “Food was celebration, conversation, and nourishment. The table is where the big decisions of the family are made and all the arguing takes place.”

— Adriana Trigiani

99. “And so, when I was a young writer I always worked hard on imagery, and I knew that the roots of imagery were the senses – and that if my readers could feel, taste and see what I was talking about, I would be able to tell them a story.”

— Adriana Trigiani

100. “I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.”

— Adriana Trigiani