Top 60 Barbara Delinsky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Choices are easy when you have nothing to lose.”

— Barbara Delinsky

2. “There are always hurdles in life. Getting over them is how we move forward.”

— Barbara Delinsky

3. “Taking responsibility is a step toward redemption.”

— Barbara Delinsky

4. “People don’t cry because they’re weak. They cry because they’ve been strong for too long.”

— Barbara Delinsky

5. “Wolves go after a wounded deer, it is the nature of the beast.”

— Barbara Delinsky

6. “When the truth emerges, it can’t be ignored. Nor will it wait.”

— Barbara Delinsky

7. “Rain didn’t make things messy. People did that all on their own.”

— Barbara Delinsky

8. “You have a fuchsia heart. And a fuchsia heart doesn’t die, it simply bides its time, taking a backseat to pragmatism, all while leaking helpless drops of color here and there. Hence, teal gables, turquoise earrings, and saffron scarves.”

— Barbara Delinsky

9. “When you lose the most precious thing in your life, how do you go on? How do you not?”

— Barbara Delinsky

10. “Sometimes we do all the wrong things for all the right reasons. We can be our own worst enemies. It takes a while to get over that.”

— Barbara Delinsky

11. “When we lose someone we love, we can either die with them or live on to celebrate their life. I’m tired of focusing on what we lost. I want to focus on what we had.”

— Barbara Delinsky

12. “Hope is the future lined in gold, my mother used to say, but I didn’t agree. Hope wasn’t the future. It was only a vehicle to get there.”

— Barbara Delinsky

13. “Parents can be narrow-minded when it comes to the dreams they have for their kids.”

— Barbara Delinsky

14. “Sarcasm is the language of the devil.”

— Barbara Delinsky

15. “Right or not, a mother always blamed herself when something went wrong.”

— Barbara Delinsky

16. “If you want to disappear, Emily, you can do it most anywhere.”

— Barbara Delinsky

17. “Is it harder to dream about what you don’t have, than to live in fear of losing what you do?”

— Barbara Delinsky

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18. “The important part of growing older was the growing part. Resisting change meant forever standing still, which was a sad way to live.”

— Barbara Delinsky

19. “I can’t spend the rest of my life competing for your attention and coming in last.”

— Barbara Delinsky

20. “I had nothing to fear from my father. Except his disappointment. Which was no small thing.”

— Barbara Delinsky

21. “Anger was what came of hurt that had simmered too long.”

— Barbara Delinsky

22. “Every man wants love, if he can get past the fear of exposure.”

— Barbara Delinsky

Featured in: Romance Quotes

23. “Just when you thought you’d reached a good place in life, a crisis could erupt and spill into the corners you thought most secure.”

— Barbara Delinsky

24. “Wildness in animals is a curious thing to us humans. Isn’t that why people watch Animal Planet? Escape. Maybe that’s why we watch. Animal behavior is elemental. It takes us back to a simpler time.”

— Barbara Delinsky

25. “What she did have, after raising two children, was the equivalent of a PhD in mothering and my undying respect.”

— Barbara Delinsky

26. “She thought about this. She had analyzed it in depth. When you live alone, travel alone, exist solely on the outskirts of other people’s lives, you do have time to wonder why what you want most in life is out of reach. You also have the time to tell yourself that you don’t want it at all, though whether you can ever be completely convinced is something else.”

— Barbara Delinsky

27. “Quinnipeague in August was a lush green place where inchworms dangled from trees whose leaves were so full that the eaten parts were barely missed. Mornings meant ‘thick o’ fog’ that caught on rooftops and dripped, blurring weathered gray shingles while barely muting the deep pink of rosa rugosa or the hydrangea’s blue. Wood smoke filled the air on rainy days, pine sap on sunny ones, and wafting through it all was the briny smell of the sea.”

— Barbara Delinsky

28. “I love crowds. They make me feel part of something big and important.”

— Barbara Delinsky

29. “It was too early in the day for this kind of discussion – but really, was it ever too early to discuss matters of the heart? What if the moment passed and never returned?”

— Barbara Delinsky

30. “Which is more abiding – a mother’s love or a child’s need for it?”

— Barbara Delinsky

31. “You kids were all in college, and I suddenly saw that I was stuck alone with a man who, all those years later, was still wanting me to be someone I wasn’t.”

— Barbara Delinsky

32. “Did you hear about the lawyer hurt in a crash? An ambulance stopped suddenly.”

— Barbara Delinsky

33. “Pain is pain. You have a right to feel it.”

— Barbara Delinsky

34. “Mothering is precarious. You try to do the right thing – you think you have – then wham.”

— Barbara Delinsky

35. “Every woman feels. It just takes the right man to make things combust.”

— Barbara Delinsky

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36. “Confrontation was a great idea – unless the odds were so stacked against you that it was pointless.”

— Barbara Delinsky

37. “So where does that leave me? I like hosting the show... It’s become my identity. If that’s gone, where am I?”

— Barbara Delinsky

38. “People don’t get what they deserve; they get what they work for.”

— Barbara Delinsky

39. “Being friends is different from being lovers. It’s a sea change.”

— Barbara Delinsky

Featured in: Romance Quotes

40. “But wasn’t a best friend also someone you could trust not to hurt you? I had hurt Vicki, yet here she was, opening her home and heart to me again. So maybe being a best friend entailed the ability to forgive.”

— Barbara Delinsky

41. “What if the past won’t stay packed away in a box with my name on it, just sitting there until I feel like taking if off the shelf and lifting the lid?”

— Barbara Delinsky

42. “Except she wasn’t Vicki Bell anymore. She was Vicki Bell Beaudry, owner of the Red Fox with her husband, Rob, whose family was nearly as rooted in Bell Valley as the Bell family was, hence a questionable welcome there, too.”

— Barbara Delinsky

43. “Home development is about wishful thinking. It’s about capturing a dream.”

— Barbara Delinsky

44. “Love was such a complex emotion, so overpowering and all-consuming. Love conquered all, the old saying went.”

— Barbara Delinsky

45. “Some women are born with an instinct for knowing how things work – and what to do when they break.”

— Barbara Delinsky

46. “What made a friend a best friend? Did it have to be someone who knew your people, who shared your life outlook or your views on religion or politics? Could it just be someone who could talk and listen and commiserate?”

— Barbara Delinsky

47. “The people who get places in life are the ones who stay ahead of the game.”

— Barbara Delinsky

48. “You don’t seem it.” “I am happy.” “But you’ve just given me all the reasons I don’t need to have.”

— Barbara Delinsky

49. “Confidence could be applied like makeup. I knew that for fact.”

— Barbara Delinsky

50. “Searching for self implied either not liking who you are or wanting to escape who you’ve been.”

— Barbara Delinsky