Top 500 Casey McQuiston Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “An idea can’t want you back. And I’m starting to think that was kind of the whole point.”

— Casey McQuiston

452. “By the way, in this relationship, I am absolutely the Han and you are absolutely the Leia. Don’t try to argue because you’ll be wrong.”

— Casey McQuiston

453. “Hang on,′ Alex says. ‘Are we. Um. Are we asking the same thing?”

— Casey McQuiston

454. “Look. I don’t know. I don’t even exactly know, like, how being a legislator would work if I’m with a prince of another country. So, you know. There’s stuff to figure out. But way worse people with way bigger problems than me get elected all the time.”

— Casey McQuiston

455. “Are you angling for a revolutionary soldier role-play scenario? I must inform you, any trace of King George III blood I have would curdle one my very veins and render me useless to you.”

— Casey McQuiston

456. “It’s the fuckin’ subway, not the fuckin’ Notebook.”

— Casey McQuiston

457. “You mean to tell me,” Alex half shouts, jogging to keep up, “every Thanksgiving, those stupid turkeys have been staying in a luxury suite at the Willard on the taxpayers’ dime?”

— Casey McQuiston

458. “I thought he was your friend,” Rory says. “Dixon is a guy I hang out with,” Smith tells him. “That’s not the same thing.”

— Casey McQuiston

459. “Living with Kit was like living in a pixie nest. Every night, I’d find my phone charger relocated to my nightstand and my water bottle beside it, refilled at the precise temperature I liked. Dates circled themselves on the calendar. Fresh flowers appeared whenever the old ones wilted. And no matter how carelessly I unloaded the dishwasher, when I checked the back of the utensil drawer, the measuring spoons were always there.”

— Casey McQuiston

460. “Get a clarifying shampoo and suck it up, Kylo Ren.”

— Casey McQuiston

461. “Well, I did go to uni. It just wasn’t necessarily the reading that did it.”

— Casey McQuiston

462. “It lasts only a minute or two, but it feels like a year lost in Jane’s hair and Jane’s lips and Jane’s past, Jane’s hands fisting in her curls, Jane’s thigh warm and steady under her, Jane for hours, Jane for days. It pulls like an undertow, and the case is up on the surface, and August is trying to stay there too.”

— Casey McQuiston

463. “Shara doesn’t throw things away because they mean nothing to her. She throws things away because they mean too much.”

— Casey McQuiston

464. “She says you’re lovely, but she doesn’t settle for second place.”

— Casey McQuiston

465. “Just because you can’t run doesn’t mean you can make me do it for you.”

— Casey McQuiston

466. “He has a bit of a caring-too-much problem about most things, including whether people can pay their medical bills, or marry whomever they love, or not get shot at school.”

— Casey McQuiston

467. “But I only stayed long enough to take the good, and I always left when the bad got bad.”

— Casey McQuiston

468. “Of course. Of course Shara gave her this instead of an explanation. Of course Shara cast herself as the main character of her own personal John Green novel.”

— Casey McQuiston

469. “What, did you think I was Sloane?” Henry says, pushing the panel open a crack and yanking Alex into a wide, dark plaza.”

— Casey McQuiston

470. “He switches off the lamp, and when he turns toward their room, August sees the soft melt of his smile, the gentle crease at one side of his mouth, a secret thing. They’ll sleep separately tonight, and somehow this hurts her heart more, the easy tether between them that doesn’t need a constant touch. The assurance that the other person is right there in your orbit, always, waiting to be tugged back in. Niko and Myla could be on opposite sides of an ocean and they’d breathe in sync.”

— Casey McQuiston

471. “He also thought about prying up the staples with his fingers and taking the picture out and keeping it in his room, but he never did. His fingernails were too stubby; they weren’t made for it like June’s, like a girl’s.”

— Casey McQuiston

472. “Mr. Truman has never said he’s gay, he is a single fortysomething choir director with an extensive collection of slouchy sweaters. Some of the sweaters even have elbow patches. Like, come on.”

— Casey McQuiston

473. “There’s something so admirable about his directness. I like you. Stay in my life. It’s perfectly simple, when he says it like that.”

— Casey McQuiston

474. “She barely has time to finish before Anderson Cooper is back onscreen with breaking news. Alex wonders briefly what it’s going to be like to have future Anderson Cooper stress hallucinations.”

— Casey McQuiston

475. “I mean, I can’t just jump into the twenty-first century without knowing how the wifey works – ” “Wi-Fi.”

— Casey McQuiston

476. “She sounds like she’s vision-boarding his funeral.”

— Casey McQuiston

477. “The hottest girl August has ever seen just took one look at her and said, “Yikes.”

— Casey McQuiston

478. “See, this means I can’t possibly be into guys.”

— Casey McQuiston

479. “Henry to download Snapchat.”

— Casey McQuiston

480. “Sometimes you have to feel it because it deserves to be felt.”

— Casey McQuiston

481. “How does she explain that she used to be afraid to love anyone because there’s a well at the center of her chest and she doesn’t know where the bottom is?”

— Casey McQuiston

482. “Back in their apartment, Wes leads her to the door to his bedroom and says, “If you tell Niko or Myla I let you in here, I will deny it, and I will wait months until you’re no longer expecting my retribution and give all your stuff to that guy on the second floor whose apartment smells like onions.”

— Casey McQuiston

483. “Yes,” she says, and for good measure adds, “sir.” Ew. Hated that.”

— Casey McQuiston

484. “I can’t believe our ancestors survived centuries of wars and plagues and genocide just to wind up with your sorry ass.”

— Casey McQuiston

485. “He didn’t realize how terrified he was of her knowing until the fear is gone.”

— Casey McQuiston

486. “Ellen sighs and looks over at Leo. “I did that, didn’t I? No goddamn manners. Like a couple of little opossums. This is why they say women can’t have it all.”

— Casey McQuiston

487. “The president is sitting down with as many member of the Office of Communications as we could drag out of bed at three in the morning,” Zahra tells him, ignoring his question. The phone is buzzing none stop in her hand. “It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration. For god’s sake, put some clothes on.”

— Casey McQuiston

488. “Why do you even have staff?” Alex says. “Nobody has ever tried to stop me from walking straight in here.”

— Casey McQuiston

489. “Part of being a Brooklyn institution, August has learned, is collecting all the New York strangeness at the end of the night like a pool filter full of june bugs.”

— Casey McQuiston

490. “It’s freezing and Alex is only wearing his suit jacket, but his chest feels warmed from the inside with liquor and something heady his brain keeps stumbling over, trying to name.”

— Casey McQuiston

491. “Re: telling Philip, sounds like a great plan. If all else fails, just do what I did and act like a huge jackass until most of your family figures it out on their own.”

— Casey McQuiston

492. “If Alex from this time last year could see this,” Alex says, leaning into Henry’s ear. “He’d say, ‘Oh, I’m in love with Henry? That must be why I’m such a berk to him all the time,’” Henry suggests.”

— Casey McQuiston

493. “You think y’all are off the hook for institutional bigotry because you come from a blue state. Not every white supremacist is a meth-head from Bumfuck Mississippi. There are plenty of them at Duke or UPenn on Daddy’s money.”

— Casey McQuiston

494. “Can’t you ever just do one thing without having to be so goddamn extra about it?”

— Casey McQuiston

495. “He doesn’t, he reminds himself, even have feelings for the guy. Really.”

— Casey McQuiston

496. “His eyes are big and soft and blue, and he desperately needs to be punched in one of them.”

— Casey McQuiston

497. “Chloe enters the choir room for lunch with a peanut butter sandwich in her lunch bag and murder in her heart.”

— Casey McQuiston

498. “Everywhere I went, someone loved me. But everywhere I went, someone hated me.”

— Casey McQuiston

499. “We can-we can figure out a way to do that together.”

— Casey McQuiston

500. “I was holding out hope that someday, somehow, Theo would come back. It isn’t as if I’ve loved the same cold memory all this time. Rilke wrote, Even your not being there is warm with you. I’m in love with Theo’s residual warmth. the indentation she left for me to grow around. All those living petals, never falling... I leave space for Theo to be something that’s still happening to me.”

— Casey McQuiston