Top 50 Bryn Greenwood Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.”

— Bryn Greenwood

2. “Sometimes waiting and being disappointed was good, to remind me he didn’t belong to me. Nothing belonged to me.”

— Bryn Greenwood

3. “From Alpha Centauri, we were twin stars, side by side.”

— Bryn Greenwood

4. “My mother always started the story by saying, ‘Well, she was born in the backseat of a stranger’s car,’ as though that explained why Wavy wasn’t normal.”

— Bryn Greenwood

5. “Your family is real, but mine isn’t? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn’t real to you. You think. I’m a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. I’m real. I’m as real as you are. My family is real like your family.”

— Bryn Greenwood

6. “I wondered at how hard it was to change your reputation, because changing yourself was only half the battle and not even the most difficult half. The hard part was convincing the people who knew you that you’d changed.”

— Bryn Greenwood

7. “I could have told him there was no sense in rushing toward being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less.”

— Bryn Greenwood

8. “When I reached her, she was a star, pulling me into her orbit.”

— Bryn Greenwood

9. “Odd couple that they were, they had a real connection.”

— Bryn Greenwood

10. “I liked to play at tragedy, but she drank it out of her baby bottle.”

— Bryn Greenwood

11. “You’re impossible! Most days I was impossible. Like a unicorn.”

— Bryn Greenwood

12. “For the first time in my life, I stopped. It wasn’t my story to tell.”

— Bryn Greenwood

13. “After Liam and Butch took Kellen away, I thought about how he left spaces for me when he talked. If I saw him again, I decided I might put words in those spaces.”

— Bryn Greenwood

14. “Summer had so many tricks. The nights lasted longer than the days, even though the angle of the Earth’s axis meant that was impossible. The night couldn’t be longer, but summer made it seem that way. Summer sneaked time for me, taking a minute from February, three minutes from English class in March, ten whole minutes from a boring Thursday in April. Summer stole time to give me another hour under the stars with Kellen.”

— Bryn Greenwood

15. “The quizzes helped Renee empty her heart, and she filled it so quickly with the wrong things, it was no wonder she needed to empty it.”

— Bryn Greenwood

16. “He smelled good. Sweat and motorcycle and wintergreen. No stinking weed smoke. No perfume. No sadness. He smelled like love.”

— Bryn Greenwood

17. “Feeling dead was better than when my heart hurt. Sometimes I thought it might burn through my ribs while I was asleep, and smolder in the sheets until the whole house caught fire.”

— Bryn Greenwood

18. “Your family is real, but mine isn’t? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn’t – ” She ran out of air and took a gulp. “ – real to you. You think. I’m a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. Stupid photo albums. But you. You’re smart. You make smarter choices. For us.” She.”

— Bryn Greenwood

19. “I was lying on the tracks under a train I was in love with.”

— Bryn Greenwood

20. “Summer had so many tricks. The nights lasted longer than the days, even though the angle of the Earth’s axis meant that was impossible.”

— Bryn Greenwood

21. “I looked at the things people think they own. I didn’t take things very often, but I liked to move them. Car keys, purses, glasses, one shoe out of a pair. The.”

— Bryn Greenwood

22. “Right then, I realized I’d been going about things the wrong way. You make people interested in you by keeping secrets, not by passing them out like candy at Halloween.”

— Bryn Greenwood

23. “Viewed from my bed, he was a distant constellation. From Alpha Centauri, we were twin stars, side by side.”

— Bryn Greenwood

24. “There’s a silo there with a tree growing in it.”

— Bryn Greenwood

25. “In a stranger’s house, it was easy to see what needed doing.”

— Bryn Greenwood

26. “I wanted a fairy tale ending for Wavy, because if she could find happiness, there would be hope for me, too.”

— Bryn Greenwood

27. “I’d been going along thinking I was Shakespeare, but I’d written myself out of the play.”

— Bryn Greenwood

28. “On the mouth, but nothing dirty. The kind of kiss you give someone you love. She.”

— Bryn Greenwood

29. “That’s not the only thing love means. You just got your mind in the gutter.”

— Bryn Greenwood

30. “He needed me to speak, because his heart hurt, too. I didn’t want to be mean, but sometimes, it was dangerous to open my mouth and let words out.”

— Bryn Greenwood

31. “Nothing belongs to you. It didn’t matter that Grandma gave the cookbook to me. All Mama had to do was hold it in her hands and it was hers.”

— Bryn Greenwood

32. “I love you, Wavy. I love you.” I said it until she relaxed. “Now put your ring back on.”

— Bryn Greenwood

33. “Girl that age ought not to have so many troubles, but she did. Looking at it that way, them two was about made for each other.”

— Bryn Greenwood

34. “Those letters seemed so wonderfully tragic to me. Each one a message he would never get. A note in a bottle, bobbing on the ocean. Lost.”

— Bryn Greenwood

35. “You need to figure out how to live here or you need to get the hell out.”

— Bryn Greenwood

36. “You can look up keening in the dictionary, but you don’t know what it means until you hear somebody having their heart ripped out.”

— Bryn Greenwood

37. “I love you. I love you all the way.”

— Bryn Greenwood

38. “You make people interested in you by keeping secrets, not by passing them out like candy at Halloween.”

— Bryn Greenwood

39. “Mama kept her makeup and pills in a drawer, like secrets.”

— Bryn Greenwood

40. “That’s the problem with the Christmas story: most of the roles are for boys. The only girl is there because men can’t have babies.”

— Bryn Greenwood

41. “I thought of all the lawyers who’d passed through my life, and I didn’t envy any of them the part they’d played.”

— Bryn Greenwood

42. “If you showed up dead, I bet the cops wouldn’t even care,” said the one who hung back behind his friend. He wore a gold cross on a chain.”

— Bryn Greenwood

43. “I couldn’t say, “I lost the best thing that ever happened to me.” Wasn’t that punishment enough?”

— Bryn Greenwood

44. “In the meantime, the things that hurt other people healed me.”

— Bryn Greenwood

45. “Truth was she took care of him as much as he did her. There was a few times when he was younger that I thought to myself, One of these days, he ain’t gonna show up for work, ’cause he’ll be at home with a gun in his mouth. I had an uncle did that. Jesse Joe was a man with a deep streak of lonely, until Wavy came along.”

— Bryn Greenwood

46. “Mr. Arsenikos said if you knew the constellations you would never get lost. You could always find your way home.”

— Bryn Greenwood

47. “Most days I was impossible. Like a unicorn.”

— Bryn Greenwood

48. “That night I first saw you, I was going too fast. There I was rubbernecking at you and dumped the bike. Wrecked me up. I don’t want to wreck us up like that. I don’t want you to get hurt.” She.”

— Bryn Greenwood

49. “Now you know, okay? From here on out, only you. I promise.”

— Bryn Greenwood

50. “We didn’t need to talk. We just laid there watching falling stars go streaking white through all that darkness.”

— Bryn Greenwood