Top 30 Caroline B. Cooney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “But I found my family. I found the right thing to do. I found the way home.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

2. “But sometimes, in tight corners, when your back is against the wall and the world is against you, you have to fight back in unexpected ways.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

3. “When in doubt, shut up.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

4. “Breakfast was only worth having when somebody else made it for you.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

5. “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

6. “If you write a story based on a real person, you’re trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

7. “What more can life hold, than to know that because of your story, somebody out there has decided to read again!”

— Caroline B. Cooney

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

8. “People think they own time. They have watches and clocks and digital pulses. But they are wrong. Time owns them.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

9. “She had gradually changed her name. “Jane” was too dull. Last year, she’d added a “y”, becoming Jayne, which had more personality.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

10. “I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

11. “How terrifying empty beds were. The neatness of the sheets and blankets was like the neatness of a mowed and trimmed graveyard.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

12. “Guys with nice person names try to be sympathetic.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

13. “I guess even really annoying people can be right sometimes.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

14. “Lying on the front passenger seat, as if it didn’t matter, was Rose’s Diary. It Mattered.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

15. “Her laughter began low and quiet then rose in pitch and flickered all over the room, like blood splatter.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

16. “Listen to the sea... it sounds like a coffin being dragged over broken glass.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

17. “People nearly always believe, and are willing to back it up with weapons and cruelty, that their religion and way of life is better than the other person’s.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

18. “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

19. “Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

20. “My favorite book is always the one I’m working on at the moment.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

21. “The most crippling part of my personality is that as much as I want to know something, I can’t bear admitting I’m ignorant. It’s as if I think I should have been born knowing and understanding all. As if when I say out loud, what are you talking about? the world will point and jeer.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

22. “I decided to write short stories because they got rejected quicker.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

23. “I approach serious subjects, and I like to have the good guys win and have the parents among the good guys.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

24. “I believe my voice is pretty much the same. I’ve written 75 books, so I’m better at it now than I was earlier in my career.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

25. “The sea can smack the rocks like a hand smacking a cheek. It can hiss or gurgle or even kiss. But when it wants, it can go quiet. ‘And then’, said Anya Rothrock, ‘you can hear the voices of the drowned’.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

26. “Bianca and Mindy crept into the room like great big fashionable mice.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

27. “I get letters from readers who say that they have always hated reading, but somebody suggested one of my books, they actually finished the book and enjoyed it, and they’re going on to read another book. I’m thrilled that they have figured out that reading is fun.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

Featured in: Reading Quotes, Fun Quotes

28. “I believe my readers are crazy about their parents and want to be just like them when they grow up.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

29. “I’m one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

30. “Stephen had just come from a class discussion in which several students believed that the right cup of herbal tea would save them from pain and sorrow. Well acquainted with pain and sorrow, Stephen did not contribute to the discussion. He merely crossed these idiots off his list of possible friends.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

31. “Sometimes Reeve couldn’t stand women. They were so practical.”

— Caroline B. Cooney

32. “You had to assume that his body would grow to match, in which case Stephen would become a man of splendid proportions.”

— Caroline B. Cooney