Top 30 Adrienne Brodeur Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I know that no one’s story is simple. And no single story tells the whole truth.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

2. “I felt as if I were watching myself from above, unable to comprehend the happiness of the people around me.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

3. “In our family, being right trumped being truthful. There was no room for uncertainty, so you never let down your guard.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

4. “As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

5. “I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn’t have a moral compass. It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

6. “Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years, my job was to pile on sand – fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated – in an effort to keep my mother’s secret buried.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

7. “All I knew at that moment was I felt lucky. My mother had chosen me, and, together, we were embarking on a great adventure.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

8. “Desperate to become enriched by books, I sometimes barely remembered what I’d read, yet the unconscious effect of so many sentences felt cumulative, like recurring dreams.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

9. “You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself.” Margot promised.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

10. “I turned to memory, knowing full well that it is revisionist and that each time we remember something, we alter it slightly, massaging our perspective and layering it with new understanding in order to make meaning in the present.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

11. “Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It’s about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you’re able to be yourself.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

12. “His response was incomprehensible to me. How could you not want to know... Wasn’t curiosity a simple fact of human nature?”

— Adrienne Brodeur

13. “The lonely feeling comes from not feeling known.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

14. “My mother had narrowed her vision and chosen happiness, and I had willingly signed on, both of us ignoring the dangers of the new terrain.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

15. “Does your life feel authentically your own?”

— Adrienne Brodeur

16. “We spoke on the phone regularly and turned to text when she could no longer talk. What would I do without her? Her answer came in her final text message to me, written on the morning of her death: Where is Nora Ephron when we need her? I took this to mean “Embrace the mess, live fully, carry on.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

17. “If there was one truth that I’d learned from all my reading, it was this: Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene. This time, that someone was me.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

18. “Blink, and you’ll miss your treasure. Blink again, and you’ll realize that the truth you thought was completely hidden, has materialized some ungainly part of it revealed under new conditions.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

19. “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

20. “Why is it that an insult stays with you forever, whereas love and praise passes through you like water through a sieve?”

— Adrienne Brodeur

21. “A buried truth, that’s all a lie really is.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

22. “Did I want meat or fish for dinner? I couldn’t decide. Hair up or down? Either. Would I prefer to walk or bike? Neither. I wanted to sleep. It felt as if in making any inconsequential decision, I might choose wrongly and forever close a door; there would go my other life.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

23. “We all know the adage that one lie begets the next. Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

24. “Jack didn’t happen to me: I happened to Jack.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

25. “But I also found my depression tedious – tedious to live through, tedious to explain, tedious to be around. I was bored by my own relentless loop and felt sure I was boring everyone around me.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

26. “To this day, I cannot imagine my parents ever having been in love, nor can I fathom what attracted them to each other. Although there are photographs of them together in our baby albums, I have no memories of them as a married couple.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

27. “Aristotle famously suggested that through the mirror of friendship, people are able to see themselves in ways that are otherwise inaccessible.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

28. “A little lift meant a little fall; a bigger lift, a bigger fall.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

29. “Jack’s instinct to protect himself might have been the most alien thing I’d ever encountered. I’d never had a wound – emotional or physical – that I didn’t probe repeatedly.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

30. “It was as if a lifetime’s worth of emotional chutes and trapdoors installed for self-protection decades ago had malfunctioned in a spectacular way.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

31. “Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

32. “I’d not felt so much as a pinprick of foreboding or dark premonition about what lay beyond the curve of time.”

— Adrienne Brodeur

33. “Books will change your lie, Rennie... you have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else’s life’ Margo said... ‘you can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself’...”

— Adrienne Brodeur

34. “You have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else’s life,” Margot said.”

— Adrienne Brodeur