Top 200 Ann Napolitano Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I miss you, Daddy. I wish you could have seen me as a mother. It would have made you smile.”

— Ann Napolitano

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Ann Napolitano

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Ann Napolitano

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Ann Napolitano

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

— Ann Napolitano

64. “Her father had called Julia his rocket ever since she was a little girl – I can’t wait to watch you fly, he’d say – and she was the one who fixed problems.”

— Ann Napolitano

65. “He wanted to know where the ice was weakest beneath their feet so he could keep them from falling through.”

— Ann Napolitano

66. “If you live long enough, everything is complicated.”

— Ann Napolitano

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

— Ann Napolitano

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

— Ann Napolitano

69. “She wondered if dying was simply going to be an exercise in letting go of one thing after another.”

— Ann Napolitano

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

— Ann Napolitano

71. “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

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

— Ann Napolitano

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Ann Napolitano

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Ann Napolitano

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “Each letter feels like a page in a book that he won’t fully understand until he reaches the end. It feels imperative – in a way nothing else in his life has – that he read every word. The attention he brings to the letters seems to be changing him; Edward can feel strands inside himself gathering, trying to find a shape in which he will be able to meet the eyes of the people in the photographs.”

— Ann Napolitano

92. “The sky, as if taking a breath, lightens.”

— Ann Napolitano

93. “He was vast, and beautiful, and more present in the gift of baby formula to a young mother than in any.”

— Ann Napolitano

94. “No matter how many minutes remained on the clock, there was no chance of victory.”

— Ann Napolitano

95. “Sylvie had always thought that when, if, she wrote, it would have to be perfect. A beautifully crafted novel, ready to hand to the world. But William had shown her she could write for, and to, herself. And Whitman had rewritten, expanded, cut, and reimagined his poems across his life. He’d created not one beautiful book but different attempts at excellence and beauty as he aged and loved and reconsidered everything.”

— Ann Napolitano

96. “I could be mad at you. I could scream at you. But I won’t. You raised me to take care of myself, and I will.”

— Ann Napolitano

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

— Ann Napolitano

98. “He’d convinced himself something between them was broken, when in truth the broken thing was him. Edward’s cheeks grow hot. He, alone, had almost destroyed the most important part of his life.”

— Ann Napolitano

99. “Edward spends every night reaching for unconsciousness as if it were a rock in the middle of a river, while a fierce current pulls him away. His fingertips sometimes.”

— Ann Napolitano

100. “He closes his eyes for a second, and Edward sees the lines of pain on Gary’s face; they’re the same lines – carved by loss – that engrave Edward’s whole self, and the boy shudders in recognition.”

— Ann Napolitano