Top 30 Ann Hood Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Don’t waste your one beautiful life.”

— Ann Hood

2. “I have learned that there is more power in a good strong hug than in a thousand meaningful words.”

— Ann Hood

Featured in: Strong Quotes

3. “A sibling is the lens through which you see your childhood.”

— Ann Hood

4. “I was kind of an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer-I just was one.”

— Ann Hood

5. “In Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline seamlessly knits together the past and present of two women, one young and one old. Kline reminds us that we never really lose anyone or anything or – perhaps most importantly – ourselves.”

— Ann Hood

6. “Time doesn’t heal, I had learned, it just keeps moving. And it takes us with it.”

— Ann Hood

7. “No mother should lose her child.”

— Ann Hood

8. “When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a series published by Bobbs-Merrill called ‘The Childhood of Famous Americans.’ In it, historical figures like Clara Barton, Nancy Hanks, Elias Howe, Patrick Henry, and dozens more came to life for me as children.”

— Ann Hood

9. “Grief doesn’t have a plot. It isn’t smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.”

— Ann Hood

10. “If you want to feel like ginger ale Claire, drink a ginger ale.”

— Ann Hood

11. “The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that? Instead, she said, “I love you.” She did. She loved him. But even that didn’t feel like anything anymore.”

— Ann Hood

12. “Sometimes we pray for help in accepting what comes our way. That takes a bit of magic, too” -George.”

— Ann Hood

13. “Still, he loved her. She knew that. He loved her the best way he could. But she wasn’t sure that was enough anymore.”

— Ann Hood

14. “Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God.”

— Ann Hood

15. “I learned to knit in 2002, six months after my 5-year-old daughter, Grace, died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. I was unable to read or write, and friends suggested I take up knitting; almost immediately I fell under its spell.”

— Ann Hood

16. “In my adult life, I had spent a lot of time angry at God, mostly over the sudden deaths in my family – my brother at 30, my daughter at 5.”

— Ann Hood

17. “Italo Calvino quote, ‘A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.’ For I have read The Great Gatsby numerous times, and always discover new things in each reading.”

— Ann Hood

18. “I don’t know what I want or what I feel. I thought I wanted this. Us. But now I’m not so sure.”

— Ann Hood

19. “When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not.”

— Ann Hood

20. “The idea of the book that matters most,” Kiki said. “Because i think it’s like impossible to pick such a book. When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not. Like if you’re unhappy and you read, I don’t know, On the Road or The Three Musketeers, and that book changes how you fell or how you think, then it matters the most. At that time.”

— Ann Hood

21. “She was always kind of sad, even when she smiled.”

— Ann Hood

22. “I see you in the library. The way you love the books.”

— Ann Hood

23. “It mattered most to me then because of where I was in my life. So in a way, there isn’t just one book that matters most, there might be several, or even a dozen.”

— Ann Hood

24. “He liked the right before part of things, when it was impossible to be disappointed.”

— Ann Hood

25. “She imagined books and this book group getting her through whatever was coming next.”

— Ann Hood

26. “I believe that, magically, the book we are supposed to read somehow appears in our hands at just the right time.”

— Ann Hood

27. “No one can write like Cheryl Strayed.”

— Ann Hood

28. “In the library I was handed a blueprint on how to live the mysterious, unnamable, big dream life I wanted. I was handed books. And through reading them, I grew up to find that very life.”

— Ann Hood

29. “She took the first tentative, terrifying, exhilarating steps into her future.”

— Ann Hood

30. “All that was missing... was everything else.”

— Ann Hood

31. “Darling, the psalm tells us that we must walk through the valley. we cannot walk around it, I’m afraid.”

— Ann Hood

32. “Could a writer understand how her book had saved someone long ago, when the world was a fragile, scary place and the people she loved weren’t in it anymore? Could a writer understand that her book had mattered more than anything?”

— Ann Hood

33. “Oddly, our mall had a small movie theater that showed foreign and independent films. I loved going there, loved how what I saw often confused or embarrassed me, how the movies there made me think in ways that only books did.”

— Ann Hood

34. “My first trip to New York City, when I was seven, was a world wind of Macy’s, the Empire State building, and club sandwiches at a diner. On a whim, my parents took us there for the day, and my strongest memory is a revolving doors. It seemed to me than that to enter anywhere in Manhattan, you had to step into one and spin.”

— Ann Hood