Top 60 Amy Bloom Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.”

— Amy Bloom

Featured in: Self-Love Quotes, Acceptance Quotes, Positive Quotes for Women, Beauty Quotes, Know Your Worth Quotes

2. “Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.”

— Amy Bloom

Featured in: Choices Quotes, Love You Quotes, Marriage Quotes, Love Quotes for Wife, I Love My Husband Quotes

3. “You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary.”

— Amy Bloom

4. “Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.”

— Amy Bloom

5. “Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.”

— Amy Bloom

6. “A blind man can see how much I love you.”

— Amy Bloom

7. “The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.”

— Amy Bloom

8. “We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time.”

— Amy Bloom

9. “The greatest struggle in my life is between a dignified silence and having my say.”

— Amy Bloom

10. “Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.”

— Amy Bloom

11. “Every woman’s body is an intimate landscape. The hills, the valleys, the narrow ledges, the riverbanks, the sudden eruptions of soft or crinkling hair. Here are the plains, the fine dry slopes. Here are the woods, here is the smooth path to the only door I wish to walk through. Eleanor’s body is the landscape of my true home.”

— Amy Bloom

12. “Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.”

— Amy Bloom

13. “Boundaries are the lines we draw that mark off our autonomy and that of other people, that protect our privacy and that of others. Boundaries allow for intimate connection without dissolving or losing one’s sense of self.”

— Amy Bloom

14. “All intimacy is rare-that’s what makes it precious.”

— Amy Bloom

15. “There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.”

— Amy Bloom

16. “My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.”

— Amy Bloom

17. “It was a festival of maternal love, all day, every day.”

— Amy Bloom

18. “Be real and unashamed. Even of your faults.”

— Amy Bloom

19. “It is a wonderful, moving, heart-filling experience to sit with the man or woman you love and your beloved children and know that all are happy to be just where they are with each other and loving one another. This doesnt happen very often.”

— Amy Bloom

20. “And sometimes we cling because the memory is so painful that we can’t stop visiting it and hoping to make it come out differently. The risk of letting go is that we have to confront our own selves and our own possibilities.”

— Amy Bloom

21. “Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.”

— Amy Bloom

22. “I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else’s life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.”

— Amy Bloom

23. “Is it better for a woman to marry a man who loves her than a man she loves.”

— Amy Bloom

24. “I met Jay Jonhson. I won him the way poor people occasionally win the lottery: Shameless perseverance and embarrassingly dumb luck, and every time I see one of those sly, toothless, beaten-down souls on TV holding a winning ticket, I think, Go, team.”

— Amy Bloom

25. “It takes something to get married: nerve, hope, a strong desire to make a certain statement – and it takes something to stay married: more hope, determination, a sense of humor, and needs that are best met by being in a pair.”

— Amy Bloom

26. “Be real and be unashamed, even of your faults. I do truly know what my husband is made of and vice versa.”

— Amy Bloom

27. “For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.”

— Amy Bloom

28. “Every couple has the same five arguments in their lifetime, which is really just the one, over and over, until people die or divorce. What it is depends on who you are and what your parents did to you.”

— Amy Bloom

29. “I wasn’t surprised to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein’s store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable.”

— Amy Bloom

30. “I do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness.”

— Amy Bloom

31. “Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.”

— Amy Bloom

32. “Aging is a chance to make what was good, great; and what was never so good, better.”

— Amy Bloom

33. “He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said – women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me.”

— Amy Bloom

34. “Whitman said, ‘I am as bad as the worst but, thank God, I am as good as the best.’ You ought to spend more time with people who know how bad they are.”

— Amy Bloom

35. “The function of democratic living is not to lower standards but to raise those that have been too low.”

— Amy Bloom

36. “Literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.”

— Amy Bloom

37. “I wish I’d thrown my arms around Gus’s neck and kicked up my back foot or squealed his name or any of the things that a normal woman would do, seeing a man she was fond of, who she thought was dead.”

— Amy Bloom

38. “She insulted conservatives and cowards every time she opened her mouth.”

— Amy Bloom

39. “If I had been a more realistic and reasonable person, if I had not been twenty-one and still fooling myself, I would have said, Wait.”

— Amy Bloom

40. “Criticism is like pain. It’s not fun but if it doesn’t hurt, no one pays attention.”

— Amy Bloom

41. “AB: It’s a great gift. It was the training: to listen, to observe. Those skills are very much what you need as a writer. Keep your mouth shut and see what’s happening around you. Don’t finish people’s sentences for them. Don’t just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they’re saying it. That was great training for writing.”

— Amy Bloom

42. “You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered.”

— Amy Bloom

43. “I have been lonely in my life but never when drinking strong coffee, wearing my fleecy slippers, and standing in my own kitchen.”

— Amy Bloom

44. “Amelia said, “I think women – some women – regard matrimony as a highly honorable retreat from the possibility of failure in the larger world.”

— Amy Bloom

45. “She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them.”

— Amy Bloom

46. “There are people you always love, no matter what they have done to you, no matter what you have done to them.”

— Amy Bloom

47. “When I read that I thought, I am almost fifty years old and the rest of my life will be love and loss, and when I look down the road, I see a fat old woman and her dog, is what I see.”

— Amy Bloom

48. “People,” he said. “They can’t be underestimated.”

— Amy Bloom

49. “We live and we love the world, Lillian thinks, and we kid ourselves that the world loves us back.”

— Amy Bloom

50. “Memory seems as faulty, as misunderstood and misguided, as every other thought or spasm that passes through us.”

— Amy Bloom