Top 100 Brittany Cavallaro Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “John H. Watson might have been many things – a doctor, a storyteller, and by most accounts a kind and decent man-but he clearly wasn’t a zoologist. There’s no such thing as a swamp adder. And the idea that Sherlock Holmes deduced its existence from a saucer of milk is ridiculous- snakes have zero interest in milk. They also can’t hear anything but vibrations, so they wouldn’t hear a whistle. But they do breathe, so a snake couldn’t survive in a locked safe.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

52. “Friendship I understood. There had to be an arc there, some kind of story that the two of you were telling just by being together. Something made up from what you wanted from the world and what you got instead. A story you reminded each other of when you needed to feel understood.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

53. “Every version of you is interesting to me.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

54. “I kept my own company. That was a polite way of saying that I was my own friend and if I want to be alone I’d have to get rid of myself.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

55. “I want to be good without being nice. Can I do that?”

— Brittany Cavallaro

56. “Even if I wasn’t in love with her, I couldn’t see myself loving anyone else.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

57. “What do normal people talk about?”

— Brittany Cavallaro

58. “Just because you know something about yourself doesn’t mean you should be forgiven for it.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

59. “But grief did strange things to you. Made you see yourself at a distance.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

60. “I’d heard it said before that Prague was a fairy-tale city. Watson repeated it now as we made our slow progression in from the airport. Steepled roofs, pastel buildings, cobbled roads an switchbacks. An astronomical clock that stood stories high in a public square. I’d been there once before with Milo when we were children. Our Aunt Araminta had decided we needed “culturing”. I think she may have mistaken us for bacteria.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

61. “It’s strange to grieve for your former self, and still I think it’s something that any girl understands. I’ve shed so many skins, I hardly know what I am now – muscle, maybe, or just memory. Perhaps just the will to keep going.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

62. “My mother had been monologuing about how much I’d like it there while I packed up my closet in silence, wondering if I flung myself out the window, would it properly kill me or just break both my legs.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

63. “There it was, that weightless rush, that floor-bottoming-out exhilaration that comes from saying something you can’t take back.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

64. “But these – they weren’t case updates so much as letters, the kind you wrote to someone you knew so well you could imagine them beside you, even when they were across an ocean, living out another life.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

65. “I’d prefer to think that we aren’t all so mercilessly bound to our pasts.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

66. “Maybe this is what happened when you built a friendship on a foundation of mutual disaster. It collapsed the second things righted themselves, left you desperate for the next earthquake.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

67. “Number fifteen: if you wait for full disclosure from a Holmes, it might be years before you learn a damn thing.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

68. “Holmes, my patron saint of trapdoors and fail-safes, of always remembering to pour the foundation so that, later, if you needed to, you could build a brilliant house on top.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

69. “I was somebody who only wanted to see the world through paintings, never a photograph.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

70. “He is a boy and he is in love with me, but only because the world bores him. His world is boring because it loves him, you see.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

71. “People have motives, Lottie. People aren’t blindly altruistic. Even if all they’re getting is the thrill of self-righteousness, they’re seeking some reward.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

72. “After I avoided all my calls for another day, Mrs. Dunham came by my room and politely told me that if she had to speak to my panicked mother one more time, ahe would very publicly set herself on fire.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

73. “And as for Watson – we’d smashed our friendship into bits and rebuilt it from the ground up. It resembled nothing, now, other than itself.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

74. “But I had never wanted to be her boyfriend. I wanted something smaller than that, and far, far bigger.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

75. “Honesty is more efficient than lying.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

76. “Without each other, we could, quite literally, die.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

77. “She smiled at me, that one particular smile I hardly ever saw, the one that could open padlocks, Yale locks, bank vaults, the one that was a trapdoor down into everything.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

78. “You couldn’t control how someone else felt. You could hardly control how you felt most of the time.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

79. “I was maybe the only person to ever have his imaginary friend made real.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

80. “I tried to fight the feeling that I was a guest star in my own life.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

81. “In that moment, I loved him more than anything else.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

82. “Her train of thought broke off into a bunch of little toy trains and then raced off in different directions.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

83. “You’re lucky I adore you.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

84. “She looked like a whisper made real.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

85. “The two of us, we’re the best kind of disaster.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

86. “He wound his fingers into my hair and kissed me, a promise in a language I couldn’t yet speak.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

87. “There was a kind of relief in it, the giving up.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

88. “The simplest explanation is the truest. Always.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

89. “Holmes taught me that: people would much rather correct you than answer a straightforward question.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

90. “Jesus, come on. Charlotte’s sitting outside, alone. You guys are just sad without each other. There’s like this obvious empty space next to you. – Lena.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

91. “For the next weeks, I hit snooze over and over in some wild hope that the morning would just pack up and leave me alone.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

92. “I couldn’t atone for anyone’s mistakes, but I had two hands, and I could help.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

93. “I couldn’t tell you what was in her head. I couldn’t even guess. But I was beginning to realize I liked that, the not knowing. I could trust her despite it. If she was a place unto herself, I might have been lost, blindfolded, and cursing my bad directions, but I think I saw more of it than anyone else, all the same.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

94. “Holmes wasn’t a myth, or a king. She was a person. And to have a relationship with a person, you had to treat them like one.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

95. “I took her to my favorite bookstore, where I loaded her up with Ian Rankin novels and she bullied me into buying a book on European snails.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

96. “As for Holmes, she disappeared into her magician’s trunk and swallowed the key. There would be no prying her out, not until the big reveal.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

97. “It’s not a secret. A secret is something embarrassing. Something compromising, something with power. Secrets are what we make art from.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

98. “Reading took me away from myself, so I tried to be reading all the time.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

99. “I love you. I’ve never in my life loved anything more.”

— Brittany Cavallaro

100. “There needs to be a German compound word for feeling both guilty and enraged.”

— Brittany Cavallaro