Top 40 Annabel Monaghan Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “You’re the most important person that’s ever been in my life, and you’re not even the most important person in your own.”

— Annabel Monaghan

2. “At the corner of arrogance and cluelessness, you find the worst kind of person.”

— Annabel Monaghan

3. “Sometimes you have to walk away from all the things you don’t want to make room for the future.”

— Annabel Monaghan

4. “Have you ever felt like you’re disappearing?” he asks. “Like you’re sure one day you’re going to wake up and find that the truest parts of yourself have been replaced by someone else’s plans?”

— Annabel Monaghan

5. “When I’m done, I ceremonially delete the Instagram app and move my banking app to the exact spot where it used to sit. I get in bed and scroll through my account. The big deposit, the interest. It’s infinitely satisfying, and I wish there was a like button to press.”

— Annabel Monaghan

6. “To write is to re-create something as you’d like it to be.”

— Annabel Monaghan

7. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that it’s totally possible to love someone from a safe distance.”

— Annabel Monaghan

8. “If you own up to not being perfect, life gets easier.”

— Annabel Monaghan

9. “Creating art is about being vulnerable enough to invite people to spend time in your skin.”

— Annabel Monaghan

10. “But time and sunshine bring growth, and life unfolds just the way it’s supposed to.”

— Annabel Monaghan

11. “The basic truth of parenting fills my heart: If your kids are okay, you don’t really have any problems. I will relish this feeling.”

— Annabel Monaghan

12. “I am the architect of my own experience.”

— Annabel Monaghan

13. “You are addicted to the dopamine reaction you feel when you get a hit of him. This is typical of a user who became hooked on a substance during a critical time of development, and now that addiction is woven into your nervous system. You’re well into your detox, and I am recommending no contact, which should be easy.” Dr. Judy laughed at that last comment, which stung.”

— Annabel Monaghan

14. “This feels like wealth, I think. This is the thing you save up for. You live your whole life so that you can be surrounded by too many people in too small of a room and tell the story of how it all happened.”

— Annabel Monaghan

15. “I’d like to be the person who could take all of your sad things and make them happy. Like I’d hunt down each one and turn it over.” “I don’t think anyone is that person for anyone,” I say. “I don’t think so either. But I’d like to be that person for you.”

— Annabel Monaghan

16. “We are all great survivors, and we have endless ways that we adapt to protect ourselves. There’s a balance between being safe and truly living, and it’s our job to determine how much risk our hearts can take and how deeply we are willing to love. This is a story about returning to your truest, bravest self. And it’s an exploration of whether the safety that comes with loving someone at arm’s length is worth giving up the joy of loving someone with your whole heart.”

— Annabel Monaghan

17. “I believe in love now; I’ve felt it and cannot unfeel it. It’s an imperfect thing, and it changes and breaks and heals the way people do.”

— Annabel Monaghan

18. “Love isn’t something you need to earn. Dad left because Dad, not us.”

— Annabel Monaghan

19. “And now I can never unknow the truest true thing – the intensity of the love you feel will match the intensity of its loss. This is practically physics.”

— Annabel Monaghan

20. “No,” I say. “He caught me. Just like Fancy would have. And I’ll always catch you too.”

— Annabel Monaghan

21. “You cheat because you think it’s going to make you someone else, that it’s going to save you from your own damn misery. And that’s the lie you’re telling yourself. I guess that’s the point, Sam. Another person is not going to turn you into anything but who you already are. Make sure you’re not trying to turn yourself into someone else for Jack.”

— Annabel Monaghan

22. “It’s starting to feel like a champagne summer.”

— Annabel Monaghan

23. “And it’s in this moment that I understand my mother’s love for me. I can still feel the intensity of that love and the way she walked into my home, bright as the sun, and blinded me to all the shadows. How lucky I was to be loved like that.”

— Annabel Monaghan

24. “It’s a lot easier to work through other people’s problems. I think I must be very attached to my own.”

— Annabel Monaghan

25. “It’s about how the sunrise can be the most important thing in the world to a person who’s lost touch with his soul.”

— Annabel Monaghan

26. “This is Ethan’s superpower, I think. His ability to meet people where they are and just hold the space for them to step into their best selves without any expectation of what that might be.”

— Annabel Monaghan

27. “If you’ve loved someone your whole life, it kind of makes sense that you’d love them forever.”

— Annabel Monaghan

28. “I don’t care if your first name’s “Carnegie” and your last name’s “Mellon,” you’d probably be waitlisted now.”

— Annabel Monaghan

29. “The best antidote to old memories is new ones.”

— Annabel Monaghan

30. “If it were socially acceptable, I’d like him to present me with an affidavit stipulating that he wanted to kiss me as much as I wanted to kiss him, and that if I express an interest in another kiss, he will not rescind his interest. It would be nice if it were notarized.”

— Annabel Monaghan

31. “When you smile at me, I feel like I want to capture it. But it’s not the regular way like when I see something beautiful and I want to photograph it. When you smile, it does something to me, I feel it in my chest, and I just want to figure out how to get you to do it again.”

— Annabel Monaghan

32. “A normal person, he thought many times after, would have placed a finger on his own lips to convey the same message. But he’d chosen to touch hers. It wasn’t much, but it was the beginning of everything.”

— Annabel Monaghan

33. “You can’t just keep doing what you’re doing and wait for it to turn into something happy. You kind of have to look for the happy things along the way.”

— Annabel Monaghan

34. “Love isn’t a helicopter ride to Catalina; it’s everyday care and treating the other person like they’re your house keys.”

— Annabel Monaghan

35. “It feels good to want something for someone else, something that has nothing to do with you, just because you care about them. And I wonder if this is what love is. I rest my hand on my heart to feel if it’s changed. I think it has. I have.”

— Annabel Monaghan

36. “It’s funny, what you’ll do for your kids but not for yourself.”

— Annabel Monaghan

37. “And second, that the best things come back. Sometimes it’s right after the commercial, sometimes it takes longer. But time and sunshine bring growth, and life unfolds just the way it’s supposed to.”

— Annabel Monaghan

38. “How complicated it is to be a daughter and a person.”

— Annabel Monaghan

39. “Because that’s what life is – joy peppered by loss. It’s why you get a dog. And then you get another dog.”

— Annabel Monaghan

40. “The sun comes up here, Nora.”

— Annabel Monaghan

41. “It’s like I went out into the world and grew up, and he’s still right here. Right where I left him.”

— Annabel Monaghan

42. “I’d like to be the person who could take all of your sad things and make them happy. Like I’d hunt down each one and turn it over.”

— Annabel Monaghan

43. “Love is not If you clean up, I’ll help you through your grief. I’m not sure what love is, but I think it’s something different from that.”

— Annabel Monaghan

44. “It’s the classic self-correcting problem. If someone leaves you, it’s because they didn’t want to be with you. All you lost was someone who didn’t want to be there anyway.”

— Annabel Monaghan

45. “I love the way summer rain comes out of nowhere and hits you hard like a love affair.”

— Annabel Monaghan

46. “Life’s going to do what life’s going to do, Alice. You might as well have a dog.”

— Annabel Monaghan

47. “Spring is always coming,” Phyllis says. “It never doesn’t come.”

— Annabel Monaghan

48. “Putting a person back together isn’t easy, but if you’re smart about it you can reassemble yourself in a totally different, better way.”

— Annabel Monaghan