Top 200 Ann Napolitano Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I wish you magic, Edward.”

— Ann Napolitano

52. “We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don’t have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they’re contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.”

— Ann Napolitano

53. “Opportunity did not knock until I built the door.”

— Ann Napolitano

54. “He says, “A family that big must have been a lot of work.” “It was. You’re a man, so you’ll never know work that hard. It’s reserved solely for the women.”

— Ann Napolitano

55. “They were dismantling their habits and routines, and it was like pulling up floorboards and finding joy underneath.”

— Ann Napolitano

56. “Stop thinking about who you were when you were living the wrong life, William. You’re built for the life you’re living now.”

— Ann Napolitano

57. “He was her heart. He had changed all the molecules inside her. Sylvie had known love would come for her with the force of a tsunami. She’d dreamed of this.”

— Ann Napolitano

58. “Kent’s affection for William was too clear and too uncomplicated. It shone on William like the sun. No one had ever loved him unconditionally like this, and that love, when he was the most undeserving he’d ever been in his life, made William feel like he was burning up.”

— Ann Napolitano

59. “He wonders if the scientists who tend to the Large Hadron Collider are hoping to discover not only what happens in the air between two people but how that pressurized air changes those people inside their skin. He hears the science teacher say, The air between us is not empty space.”

— Ann Napolitano

60. “In the moonlight, though, the pain is revealed to be love. The emotions are entwined; they are the two sides of the same gleaming coin.”

— Ann Napolitano

61. “She existed outside her own body-she was scattered across this ground-but somehow this made her feel less vulnerable. She was painted into this family, mirrored in her father’s face. She was more abundant than she’d believed possible.”

— Ann Napolitano

62. “She’s that magic, shimmering age – he guesses 27 – when a woman has one foot in youth and one in adulthood.”

— Ann Napolitano

63. “We contain the other, hopelessly and forever.” – James Baldwin.”

— Ann Napolitano

64. “She would wait, forever if necessary, for a man who saw the expanse of her, the way her father had.”

— Ann Napolitano

65. “Basketball was the first thing in William’s life that loved him back.”

— Ann Napolitano

66. “But perhaps what felt impossible was leaving that person behind. When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin. Charlie’s and.”

— Ann Napolitano

67. “The dream was now in the air at risk of the elements beyond her grasp.”

— Ann Napolitano

68. “She realized that she was most certainly a mammal and had the ability to shake the world apart and create a human when she unleased her power. She was a mother. This identify shuddered through her, welcome like water to a dry riverbed. It felt so elemental and true that Julia must have unknowingly been a mother all along, simply waiting to be joined by her child.”

— Ann Napolitano

69. “You’re depressed, not crazy. It’s not insane to be depressed in this world. It’s more sane than being happy.”

— Ann Napolitano

70. “The thing was – ” He stopped, looking for the right language. “Yes?” the doctor said. “Alice is a lamp. A bright lamp, from the moment she was born. She kind of shines. Looking at her hurt my eyes, and I was afraid to touch her.” “You were afraid of her light?” “No. I was afraid I was going to put her light out. That my darkness would swamp her light.” “So you felt like you had to stay away from her, to keep her safe.” “I have to stay away from her, yes.”

— Ann Napolitano

71. “Julia had accepted a job far away from her sisters and home. That collection of weeks had pulled her life out from under her like a rug. Julia had devoted herself to not losing control of her circumstances like that ever again, and she hadn’t, until recently.”

— Ann Napolitano

72. “She was Julia’s wild hair, she was the lake her husband had once been carried out of, and no matter what happened next, she was love.”

— Ann Napolitano

73. “The idea of love in those books – Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina – is that it’s a force that obliterates you. They’re all tragedies, Sylvie.”

— Ann Napolitano

74. “You and your sisters have so many reference points, such a dense history,” William said. “I never get used to it.”

— Ann Napolitano

75. “It felt like a piece of punctuation in a run-on sentence.”

— Ann Napolitano

76. “I’m not saying you have to be vegan,” Jordan says, perhaps picking up on his father’s melancholy. “If you want to continue to make animals suffer unnecessarily, be my guest.”

— Ann Napolitano

77. “When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin.”

— Ann Napolitano

78. “I didn’t expect” – she paused – “for it to be part of everything, every minute. I didn’t know that you could lose someone, and that meant you lost so much else.”

— Ann Napolitano

79. “Linda’s uptight too, but in a disheveled way. Her wires are crossed and split and her energy flow is a mess.”

— Ann Napolitano

80. “I’m not ready for this,” she says. “This,” Florida says. She thinks: This is the subject that defines women. Having babies. Will you have them? Can you have them? Do you want to have them?”

— Ann Napolitano

81. “My camp counselor won’t even let me read during lunch. She says it’s because reading is antisocial, but I think it’s because she’s actually Joseph Goebbels.” “Who’s that?” “Nazi. Burned books.”

— Ann Napolitano

82. “I’d never seen that kind of love in person. My parents loved each other, but badly, and they were miserable. So were all the other couples in my neighborhood. Have you ever actually seen that kind of love?” William shook his head. He had married out of fear, because he didn’t think he was capable of steering himself into adulthood. He’d needed Julia to be his parent more than his.”

— Ann Napolitano

83. “You know what Daddy would say when he saw Sylvie,” Julia said in a quiet voice. Emeline and Izzy nodded, and Cecelia said, “Hello beautiful.”

— Ann Napolitano

84. “Sylvie and her sisters had known themselves under their father’s gaze. And with that gaze gone, the threads that had tied their family so tightly together had loosened.”

— Ann Napolitano

85. “Sylvie reached out for the notebook. Like him, she’d grown up going to confession in church. Entering the dark booth and lowering herself to the kneeler. Confessing her sins to the screen that separated her from the priest. William thought of that sacrament now and felt bad for all the children who were forced to divide their ordinary lives into sins and not-sins so they would have something to say to a cassocked stranger.”

— Ann Napolitano

86. “Sylvie and her sisters had known themselves under their father’s gaze. And with that gaze gone, the threads that had tied their family so tightly together had loosened. What had been effortless would now take effort. What had been home for all of them was now merely Rose’s house.”

— Ann Napolitano

87. “William thought of that sacrament now and felt bad for all the children who were forced to divide their ordinary lives into sins and not-sins so they would have something to say to a cassocked stranger.”

— Ann Napolitano

88. “She fits her hand over his and presses. Her skin is soft, and the pressure makes his mouth form a smile. He can be furious with her and still be aware that he loves her at the same time. It took years for him to be able to accept the absence of logic in their love. Frustration plus a bad mood plus a particular smile of hers equaled a shot of joy in his belly.”

— Ann Napolitano

89. “She knew what mattered. She knew, at a deeper level each time, that what mattered was love. But love was what she had misread, mistaken, and misplaced in this life.”

— Ann Napolitano

90. “I’m either becoming Zen or more depressed, he thinks.”

— Ann Napolitano

91. “The stories and the people in them did sound remarkable, Sylvie thought, when spoken aloud. She and the twins had rarely talked about what happened. They’d lived through it, after all, and the loss of Julia had made them quiet. But Josie’s wonder at the stories, and Izzy’s clear enjoyment of what she saw as a soap opera in which she played a small role, took the sting out of the grief woven through those times. When Sylvie spoke their family history into the air, all she heard was love.”

— Ann Napolitano

92. “The onset of grief bore no resemblance to his experience with depression. Depression meant disconnection, shutting down, a dangerous quiet. Now William’s feelings whipped around inside him like a flailing water hose.”

— Ann Napolitano

93. “It’s hard to explain, but our love was so deep and wide that it made me love everyone and everything in sight. Which included me.” She smiled wider. “I know it sounds silly, but I’m proud of myself. I guess for living a brave life.” William nodded, unable to speak for a second.”

— Ann Napolitano

94. “Boom chicka boom. Benjamin can hear her soundtrack so clearly she might as well be carrying a speaker on each hip. In his neighborhood, she’d have a line of men following her down the street, dancing to that beat.”

— Ann Napolitano

95. “I want to know what to do,” he hears himself say, and, like the decision to write to the co-pilot’s wife, the statement is a relief. He wants to know what to do. She taps the center of his hand. “That’s easy. The same thing we all must do. Take stock of who we are, and what we have, and then use it for good.”

— Ann Napolitano

96. “His body was now more or less irrelevant. Arash studied him. “I heard you’re.”

— Ann Napolitano

97. “I’m a writer,” Jane says. “I have a habit, I guess, where I see all the possibilities in a situation. No matter what, there’s always at least one that’s terrifying.”

— Ann Napolitano

98. “When Sylvie was a child, she’d watched in amazement when friends, upset about a bad day at school or a slight from a boy they had a crush on, burst into tears at the sight of their mother. Their mother was their safe space, and so, with her, they felt every iota of their feelings.”

— Ann Napolitano

99. “The child inside Julia lay wide-eyed in the dark, knowing that she was Jo, but only because Sylvie was Beth.”

— Ann Napolitano

100. “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots, And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good, The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good. – Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Verse 7.”

— Ann Napolitano