Top 450 Bonnie Garmus Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Because I can’t risk having my scientific contributions submerged beneath your name,” she clarified.”

— Bonnie Garmus

352. “You know what?” Elizabeth said, meeting Six-Thirty on the stairs just outside the building. “We’ll just keep this between ourselves. She’s legally Mad, but we’ll call her Madeline and no one will be the wiser.” Legally Mad, Six-Thirty thought. What could possibly go wrong?”

— Bonnie Garmus

353. “Life wasn’t a hypothesis one could test and retest without consequence-something always crashed eventually.”

— Bonnie Garmus

354. “She ended every show with her signature line: “Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.”

— Bonnie Garmus

355. “What’s all this?” he finally said, pointing to her bandaged fingers. “Oh. I’m a rower. Trying to be.” “Are you any good?” “No.” “Then why are you doing it?” “I’m not sure.” He shook his head. “Boy, do I get that.”

— Bonnie Garmus

356. “Every day she found parenthood like taking a test for which she had not studied.”

— Bonnie Garmus

357. “Because in a man’s mind, why else would a woman mention bombykol on a Friday evening in an empty parking lot when the soft breeze was coming out of the west carrying the scent of her extremely expensive shampoo directly into his nasal cavity unless it was all part of a plot to get more beakers?”

— Bonnie Garmus

358. “But why is saying what you think so rare?” “Because there are consequences,” Harriet said.”

— Bonnie Garmus

359. “This was called ignoring. Or wait, no. Ignorance.”

— Bonnie Garmus

360. “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

361. “But you realize,” she said carefully, as if not to embarrass him further, “that faith isn’t based on religion. Right?”

— Bonnie Garmus

362. “Oh right,” Frask mocked. “Same old song. I’d heard the investor came back, and shazam! Here you are. I’ll say one thing for you: you’re predictable. At least you’re chasing a richer man this time. Although, between us, isn’t he a bit old for you?”

— Bonnie Garmus

363. “But the truth is, we are very much responsible for the badness in the world. And we have the power to fix it.”

— Bonnie Garmus

364. “Nor did he faint when she accidentally backed into him at the sink and he caught a whiff of her hair. He didn’t even know hair could smell like that – as if it had been washed in a basin of flowers.”

— Bonnie Garmus

365. “And that’s because early readers are only good at something others will eventually be good at, too. So being first isn’t special – it’s just annoying.”

— Bonnie Garmus

366. “Elizabeth opened every show by insisting that cooking wasn’t easy and that the next thirty minutes might very well be torturous.”

— Bonnie Garmus

367. “She was stiff, unforgiving. Truth be told, he felt a little sorry for her. No one turned this mean without having been a victim of the same.”

— Bonnie Garmus

368. “Both require patience, endurance, strength, and commitment. And neither allow us to see where we’re going – only where we’ve been.”

— Bonnie Garmus

369. “When I was a kid,” Calvin said quietly, “I used to tell myself every day was new. That anything could happen.”

— Bonnie Garmus

370. “Someone would write her a recommendation. Go. That’s how she’d ended up at Hastings Research Institute.”

— Bonnie Garmus

371. “No. You need to understand this, Calvin. People like my father preach love but are filled with hate. Anyone.”

— Bonnie Garmus

372. “The truth is, I’m not good with children,” he’d told the archbishop. “Widows, prostitutes – that’s where I really shine.”

— Bonnie Garmus

373. “The attack, or “unfortunate event,” as the admissions committee called it just before they formally rescinded her admittance to the doctoral program, had been her doing. Dr. Meyers had caught her cheating.”

— Bonnie Garmus

374. “Imagine if all men took women seriously.”

— Bonnie Garmus

375. “She was like a practical priest, someone to whom one could confess things – fears, hopes, mistakes – and expect in return, not a simpleton’s recipe for prayers and beads, or a psychologist’s standard “And how does that make you feel?” runaround, but actual wisdom. How to get on with the business at hand. How to survive.”

— Bonnie Garmus

376. “Don’t you know how being fired works? Step one: never tell anyone the truth – claim you won the lottery, inherited a cattle ranch in Wyoming, got a huge offer in New York, that sort of thing. Step two: drink to excess until you figure out what to do. Jesus. It’s like you’re not familiar with TV’s tribal ways!”

— Bonnie Garmus

377. “What a pretty picture!” he heard a mother say earlier that week as she looked down on her child’s ugly, violent scribble. Human parents, he’d noted, had a tendency to lie to their children.”

— Bonnie Garmus

378. “Do surgeons smile during appendectomies? No. Would you want them to? No. Cooking, like surgery, requires concentration.”

— Bonnie Garmus

379. “The fact is, it can be as high as ninety-nine point nine percent. Ninety-nine point nine.” Then she stopped and wrapped her arms around her daughter. “It’s my fault, sweetheart. With the exception of pi, we really haven’t covered decimals yet.”

— Bonnie Garmus

380. “Ever since you brought your little Satan home, I’ve told myself, Go by and check on her.”

— Bonnie Garmus

381. “There will be other men, Miss Zott. Maybe not as famous or as influential as Mr. Evans, but men all the same.”

— Bonnie Garmus

382. “The next day – Tuesday – Mudford’s tree assignment revelations were the talk of the school: Madeline had been born out of wedlock; Amanda didn’t have a mother; Tommy Dixon’s father was an alcoholic. Not that any of the children themselves cared about these facts, but Mudford, her mean eyes wet with excitement, ate up the data like a hungry virus, then fed it to the other mothers, who spread it around school like frosting.”

— Bonnie Garmus

383. “He doesn’t scare me, he disgusts me.”

— Bonnie Garmus

384. “But now he had her and tomorrow she’d be in close proximity to an altar and he hypothesized such proximity could revise her perception of marriage. This theory even had a scientific name: associative interference. “No,” she said quickly.”

— Bonnie Garmus

385. “Elizabeth shook her head. When it came to equality, 1952 was a real disappointment.”

— Bonnie Garmus

386. “The problem with being a minister was how many times a day he had to lie.”

— Bonnie Garmus

387. “And thus he had to live with the knowledge that not only had this other father discarded him – without even meeting him – but that chemistry itself had spawned the grudge he could neither hide nor outgrow.”

— Bonnie Garmus

388. “Although his childish scrawl was often impossible to read, his sorrow sang.”

— Bonnie Garmus

389. “Five minutes later, Roth was riding next to Elizabeth Zott in the front seat of her old blue Plymouth, the dog and the photographer relegated to the back. “He doesn’t bite, does he?” the photographer asked as he crammed himself against the window. “All dogs have the ability to bite,” she said over her shoulder. “Just as all humans have the ability to cause harm. The trick is to act in a reasonable way so that harm becomes unnecessary.”

— Bonnie Garmus

390. “Mrs. Mudford clicked her teeth. “You misunderstand me, Mrs. Zott. Children interrupt; that I can deal with. What I can’t deal with is a child who wants to change the discussion to civil rights. This is kindergarten, not The Huntley-Brinkley Report.”

— Bonnie Garmus

391. “Obviously, he knew how to find KCTV. Anyone who’d read The Incredible Journey would understand how un-incredible it was that dogs could find just about anything. He used to marvel at the needle in the haystack story Elizabeth had once read to him – marvel because what was so hard about finding a needle in a haystack? The scent of high carbon steel wire was unmistakable.”

— Bonnie Garmus

392. “Humans need reassurance,” Wakely wrote back. “They need to know others survived the hard times.”

— Bonnie Garmus

393. “Miss Frask, now age thirty-three, who, for the last four years, had dutifully followed every path promising promotion – from overselling Hastings’s benefits, to spying on specific departments, to authoring an in-house gossip column called “You Heard It Here First.”

— Bonnie Garmus

394. “He’d been officiating a funeral just last week – one of his congregants had died of lung cancer – and his message to the family, all of whom also smoked like chimneys, was that the man had died, not because of his four-pack-a-day habit, but because God needed him. The family, each inhaling deeply, thanked him for his wisdom.”

— Bonnie Garmus

395. “Obviously, she had to go; no question about it. Hastings Research Institute had standards.”

— Bonnie Garmus

396. “To protect your villagers from certain death, always slash.”

— Bonnie Garmus

397. “There was an aquamarine water-filled quarry below; she’d hit it like a missile. Her toes.”

— Bonnie Garmus

398. “What a mess devotion was.”

— Bonnie Garmus

399. “She supposed it took a certain type of skill to be able to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.”

— Bonnie Garmus

400. “Cooking is chemistry. And chemistry is life. Your ability to change everything – including yourself – starts here.”

— Bonnie Garmus