Top 450 Bonnie Garmus Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “According to Harriet, men were a world apart from women. They required coddling, they had fragile egos, they couldn’t allow a woman intelligence or skill if it exceeded their own.”

— Bonnie Garmus

152. “Whenever you start doubting yourself, whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change and change is what we’re chemically designed to do.”

— Bonnie Garmus

153. “I’m sorry,” he said gently, studying her face the way a meteorologist might watch a storm develop. “Please know you can talk to me. Rower to rower. It’s all confidential.”

— Bonnie Garmus

154. “I’m an atheist, Mr. Roth,” she said, sighing heavily. “Actually, a humanist. But I have to admit, some days the human race makes me sick.”

— Bonnie Garmus

155. “Many people go to breeders to find a dog, and others to the pound, but sometimes, especially when it’s really meant to be, the right dog finds you.”

— Bonnie Garmus

156. “But that was before Elizabeth – before he realized that making her happy made him happy. Which, he thought, as he grabbed his tennis shoes, had to be the very definition of love. To actually want to change for someone else.”

— Bonnie Garmus

157. “And not in who we are or what we’re made of, but rather, who we’re capable of becoming.”

— Bonnie Garmus

158. “It was Harriet who told me to use that moment to reconnect with my own needs, to identify my true direction, to recommit.”

— Bonnie Garmus

159. “Chemistry is change and change is the core of your belief system. Which is good because that’s what we need more of – people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren’t afraid to take on the unacceptable. But sometimes the unacceptable – your brother’s suicide, Calvin’s death – is, in fact, permanent, Elizabeth. Things happen. They just do.”

— Bonnie Garmus

160. “In her opinion, believing in God was required, like brushing teeth or wearing underwear.”

— Bonnie Garmus

161. “Yes, living with Mr. Sloane was revolting, but Harriet was not completely repelled by his physical defects – she shed herself. Rather, it was his low-grade stupidity she abhorred – his dull, opinionated, know-nothing charmless complexion; his ignorance, bigotry, vulgarity, insensitivity; and above all, his wholly undeserved faith in himself. Like most stupid people, Mr. Sloane wasn’t smart enough to know just how stupid he was.”

— Bonnie Garmus

162. “Elizabeth simply refused to accept limits, not just for herself, but for others.”

— Bonnie Garmus

163. “Walter Pine had been in television from almost the very beginning.”

— Bonnie Garmus

164. “And when you were their age you envisioned yourself becoming – ” “A loving wife and mother.” “No, seriously – ” “An open-heart surgeon,” the woman said before she.”

— Bonnie Garmus

165. “Having a baby, Elizabeth realized, was a little like living with a visitor from a distant planet. There was a certain amount of give and take as the visitor learned your ways and you learned theirs, but gradually their ways faded and your ways stuck. Which she found regrettable. Because unlike adults, her visitor never tired of even the smallest discovery; always saw the magic in the extraordinary.”

— Bonnie Garmus

166. “Walter, don’t you find it interesting that people even use that term ‘act of God’? Considering that most want to believe that God is about lambs and love and babies in mangers, and yet this same so-called benevolent being smites innocent people left and right, indicating an anger management problem – maybe even manic depression. In a psychiatric ward, such a patient would be subjected to electroshock therapy. Which.”

— Bonnie Garmus

167. “Normal isn’t like weather; you can’t expect normal. You can’t even make normal. From what I can tell, normal may not exist.”

— Bonnie Garmus

168. “Take a moment for yourself,” Harriet said. “Every day.”

— Bonnie Garmus

169. “Lying is a sin, but brag-lying? There’s nothing worse.”

— Bonnie Garmus

170. “The point is, you and your husband are completely different and yet you still have a strong connection. That’s fine. It’s also ionic.”

— Bonnie Garmus

171. “Often the best way to deal with the bad,” she said, feeling for her pencil, “is to turn it on end – use it as a strength, refuse to allow the bad thing to define you. Fight it.”

— Bonnie Garmus

172. “Are you sad, honey?” Mad placed her small, chalky hands on either side of her mother’s face. “No. But you are.”

— Bonnie Garmus

173. “When a boat succeeds, it’s because the people in the boat have managed to set aside their petty differences and physical discrepancies and row as one. Perfect harmony – that was the goal. She’d once overheard Calvin telling someone at the boathouse that his Cambridge coach insisted that they even blink at the same time. To her surprise the guy nodded. “We had to file our toenails to the same length. Made a huge difference.”

— Bonnie Garmus

174. “Cooking, like surgery, requires concentration. Anyway, Phil Lebensmal wants me to act as if the people I’m speaking to are dolts. I won’t do it, Harriet, I won’t perpetuate the myth that women are incompetent. If they cancel me, so be it. I’ll do something else.”

— Bonnie Garmus

175. “And I promise you this: you won’t get away with it.”

— Bonnie Garmus

176. “I was fired,” Elizabeth said, her voice filling with fury. “Thanks, in part, to women like you,” she snapped, “women who pander – ” “I do not pander – ” “Who play along – ” “I do not play along – ” “Who seem to think their self-worth is based on what a man – ” “How dare you – ” “No!” Elizabeth shouted, pounding on the thin steel panel that separated them. “How dare you, Miss Frask! How dare you!”

— Bonnie Garmus

177. “I believe in a few things,” he corrected. “Mostly the things about not giving up hope, not giving in to darkness. As for the word ‘preach,’ I prefer ‘relate.’ Anyway, what I believe is irrelevant.”

— Bonnie Garmus

178. “Smart woman,” Walter said. “I don’t have a lot of friends either.” Actually, he thought to himself, he only had one: Elizabeth Zott. And she wasn’t just a friend, she was his best friend.”

— Bonnie Garmus

179. “Chop the rosemary,” Elizabeth was saying quietly in the background, “with the sharpest knife you have. This minimizes damage to the plant and avoids excess electrolyte leakage.”

— Bonnie Garmus

180. “It was another thing Six-Thirty loved about her: her constant state of outrage.”

— Bonnie Garmus

181. “Elizabeth shook her head. “Our future happiness does not depend on whether or not we’re married, Calvin – at least not to me. I’m fully committed to you; marriage will not change that. As for who thinks what, it’s not just a handful of people: it’s society – particularly the society of scientific research. Everything I do will suddenly be in your name, as if you’d done.”

— Bonnie Garmus

182. “If relationships are a puzzle, then theirs was solved from the get-go – as if someone shook out the box and watched from above as each separate piece landed exactly right, slipping one into the other, fully interlocked, into a picture that made perfect sense.”

— Bonnie Garmus

183. “It’s a thirty-minute, five-day-a-week lesson in life. And not in who we are or what we’re made of, but rather, who we’re capable of becoming.”

— Bonnie Garmus

184. “Say what you want about the human race, their capacity for kindness was what – in Six-Thirty’s opinion – put them over the top, species-wise.”

— Bonnie Garmus

185. “I’m speaking of fixing us, Mr. Roth – our mistakes. Nature works on a higher intellectual plane. We can learn more, we can go further, but to accomplish this, we must throw open the doors. Too many brilliant minds are kept from scientific research thanks to ignorant biases like gender and race.”

— Bonnie Garmus

186. “There was a lot of shop talk from the others about how chemical bonds were formed, broken, then re-formed following something called an “effective collision.”

— Bonnie Garmus

187. “Why do you think so many people believe in texts written thousands of years ago? And why does it seem the more supernatural, unprovable, improbable, and ancient the source of these texts, the more people believe them?”

— Bonnie Garmus

188. “Elizabeth Zott,” she said, moving past the stork to the receptionist. “For Dr. Mason.” “You’re late,” the receptionist said icily. “I’m five minutes early,” Elizabeth corrected, checking her watch. “There’s paperwork,” the woman informed her, handing over a clipboard. Husband’s place of work. Husband’s telephone number. Husband’s insurance. Husband’s age. Husband’s bank account number. “Who’s having the baby here?” she asked.”

— Bonnie Garmus

189. “Because as a producer, he was part of Phil’s management team, and that meant he was responsible for pushing Phil’s agenda while ignoring those who ultimately paid the price for.”

— Bonnie Garmus

190. “We can learn more, we can go further, but to accomplish this, we must throw open the doors.”

— Bonnie Garmus

191. “She knew being mad at him was unfair, but grief is like that: arbitrary.”

— Bonnie Garmus

192. “Your relatives can’t make you important or smart. They can’t make you you.” “What makes me me, then?” “What you choose to do. How you live your life.”

— Bonnie Garmus

193. “That’s when someone in the audience asked for an example of an ineffective collision – something that lacked energy and never changed, but still had a big effect. Evans had leaned into his microphone. “Religion,” he said. Then he got up and left.”

— Bonnie Garmus

194. “Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water – or H2O as it’s more commonly known.”

— Bonnie Garmus

195. “Plus, getting back in a boat will make you feel so much better. We all,” he said, thinking of his row that morning, “will feel so much better. Ask your neighbor. See if she won’t watch the baby.” “At four thirty in the morning?” “This is what is so unsung about rowing,” Dr. Mason said, turning to leave. “It happens at a time when no one’s really that busy.”

— Bonnie Garmus

196. “If there’s a truism in journalism, it’s this: it’s only when the reporter stops asking that the subject starts telling.”

— Bonnie Garmus

197. “Just like after her brother’s suicide and Meyers’s attack, she could not cry. An army of tears lay just behind her eyes, but they refused to decamp.”

— Bonnie Garmus

198. “And on those rare occasions when she wasn’t defined by others’ actions, then she was dismissed out of hand as either a lightweight or a gold digger based on the thing she hated most about herself.”

— Bonnie Garmus

199. “Humans need reassurance, they need to know others survived in hard times. And unlike other species which do a better job of learning from their mistakes, humans require constant threats and reminders to be nice.”

— Bonnie Garmus

200. “Not at all,” he said. “I can safely say there is not a single normal event in the Bible. Probably one of the reasons it’s so popular. Who wants to believe life is exactly how it seems?”

— Bonnie Garmus