Top 500 Casey McQuiston Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “You’re thirty-nine.” “My liver is ninety-three.”

— Casey McQuiston

202. “A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they’re inaccessible. You must invent an entirely new system.”

— Casey McQuiston

203. “Her whole life, the gnaw of anxiety has made people opaque to her. No matter how well she knows someone, no matter the logical patterns, no matter how many allowances she knows someone might make for her – that bone-deep fear of rejection has always made it impossible for her to see any of it. It frosts over the glass. She never had anyone to begin with, so she let it be unsurprising that nobody would want to have her around.”

— Casey McQuiston

204. “Why is it so bad to want to feel special, or loved, or accpeted?”

— Casey McQuiston

205. “Mi vida entera ha sido una lucha. De modo que he luchado.”

— Casey McQuiston

206. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,′ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.”

— Casey McQuiston

207. “So, I convinced myself that, because the statistical likelihood of something happening in real life exactly the way I imagined it was so low, if I imagined the worst possible things in vivid detail, I could mathematically reduce the odds of them happening. I convinced myself that my brain had power over the probability projections of the universe. I’d lie awake at night thinking about all the worst stuff that could happen like it was my job, and I don’t know if I ever really broke the habit.”

— Casey McQuiston

208. “I don’t know, man. I was in my junior year of high school, and I touched a boob. It wasn’t very profound. Nobody’s gonna write an Off-Broadway play about it.”

— Casey McQuiston

209. “Henry touches his hand, gently, two fingertips against his palm. “Five minutes for the rest of our lives,” he says, laughing a grim little laugh. Alex reaches for him in return, presses one thumb into the hollow of his collarbone, slipping right under the knot of his tie.”

— Casey McQuiston

210. “The fog of horny war has lifted, but I’m still in the trenches. I’m down here, dying. I’ve got trench foot of the heart.”

— Casey McQuiston

211. “Nora, what’s the math?” June says, rounding on her, a slightly frantic look in her eyes. “I majored in nouns.”

— Casey McQuiston

212. “Jane’s leaning in, taking advantage of her height to bracket August in, burning so hot that August can’t make sense of the chill sweeping up her spine. So steady and beautiful and close, too close, never close enough, and August is so completely, irreversibly, spectacularly screwed.”

— Casey McQuiston

213. “Well, Alex is so in love he could die.”

— Casey McQuiston

214. “There are the flaws everyone’s allowed to see – his big mouth, his mercurial temper, his searing impulses – and then there’s this. It’s like how he only wears his glasses when nobody’s around: Nobody’s supposed to see how much he needs.”

— Casey McQuiston

215. “Tell me you still have posters up. Let me guess: Han Solo, Barack Obama, and... Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

— Casey McQuiston

216. “Coffee girl, don’t break my heart″ jane says.”

— Casey McQuiston

217. “Stop thinking.” “Yes. Gladly.”

— Casey McQuiston

218. “Any number of lies can be manufactured and disseminated.”

— Casey McQuiston

219. “Henry leans down to meet Alex’s mouth, and Alex is. Well, Alex is so in love he could die.”

— Casey McQuiston

220. “August can feel her face glowing red to match the scarf, like a giant, stammering, bisexual chameleon. An evolutionary mistake.”

— Casey McQuiston

221. “Tu madre ha sido, sin la menor duda, el amor de mi vida. Jamas amare a nadie como la he amado a ella. Era una pasion devoradora. Un amor asi es muy raro de encontrar. A veces, uno se lanza, abrigando la esperanza de no encontrarse con un precipicio al otro lado.”

— Casey McQuiston

222. “She hands over Chloe’s usual Starbucks order: iced matcha latte with two pumps of brown sugar syrup and one pump of vanilla.”

— Casey McQuiston

223. “Anderson Cooper’s face looms on the screen like a disgustingly handsome Hunger Games cannon, announcing they’re ready to call Florida.”

— Casey McQuiston

224. “You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from stratch, bring yourself to every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to escape to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there’s a place at the foot of the bed where your shoes hit the floor, and it’s the same. It’s always the same.”

— Casey McQuiston

225. “I miss figuring out scams with my friends, having a beer, going to the movies. Dumb, small life things.”

— Casey McQuiston

226. “Oh my God. I’m so mad I missed that. Did you average the results at the end? Who won?” “Chloe, we’re gay. We can’t do math.” “Okay, well, next time I’ll come and make a spreadsheet.”

— Casey McQuiston

227. “But the thing is, jumping off cliffs is kinda my thing. That’s the choice. I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose.”

— Casey McQuiston

228. “Shara’s always been this person. ‘This is what I’ve been trying to tell you’, she wrote on a card stuck under an auditorium seat. Shara’s not nice. Shara’s so many more important things than nice.”

— Casey McQuiston

229. “And so, in her first month in the apartment on the corner of Flatbush and Parkside above the Popeyes, August learns that the Q is a time, a place, and a person.”

— Casey McQuiston

230. “I kinda wish people still wrote like that. History, huh? Bet we could make some.”

— Casey McQuiston

231. “We’ve kissed, like, three times, but he has that thing where he’s terrified of being loved and refuses to believe he deserves it. It’s so tedious.’ She sees the look on August’s face and laughs. ‘I’m joking. I mean, that is his deal. But I’ve never found that boy tedious.”

— Casey McQuiston

232. “He’s just as attracted to Henry’s cloudy tempers, the way he comes back from them, and the million of shades in between.”

— Casey McQuiston

233. “The way Henry talks about him is a physical feat, drifting up in the corners with fondness but sagging in the middle under the weight.”

— Casey McQuiston

234. “How am I supposed to do that? He has the personality of a cabbage.”

— Casey McQuiston

235. “I didn’t know you wore glasses,” he says finally.”

— Casey McQuiston

236. “As your mother, I can appreciate that maybe this isn’t your fault, but as the president, all I want is to have the CIA fake your death and ride the dead-kid sympathy into a second term.”

— Casey McQuiston

237. “Anderson Cooper, you handsome bastard.”

— Casey McQuiston

238. “The next slide is titled: ‘Exploring your sexuality: Healthy, but does it have to be with the Prince of England?’ She apologizes for not having time to come up with better titles. Alex actively wishes for the sweet release of death.”

— Casey McQuiston

239. “Alex hasn’t been a good Catholic in a long time, but he knows confession is a sacrament.”

— Casey McQuiston

240. “Who names a dog David? He sounds like a tax attorney.”

— Casey McQuiston

241. “All I want is a nice girlfriend in a cottage where we have philosophical conversations over scones or something.”

— Casey McQuiston

242. “The loudest Christians I’ve ever met were the worst ones. I don’t believe doing something in front of everybody makes it more meaningful, anyway. If anything, it makes it stop belonging to you. Sometimes, when I walk into a church, I’m not sure I’m supposed to be there, even though it feels like home. Home hasn’t always been a good place for me to be.”

— Casey McQuiston

243. “So I can offer all of me. In whatever way you’ll have. And I can offer you the chance of a life if you can wait, I want you to help me try.”

— Casey McQuiston

244. “You have so much in you, it’s almost impossible to match it. But he’s your match, dumbass.”

— Casey McQuiston

245. “You only just noticed she has one outfit?” “I don’t know! It’s ripped jeans and a leather jacket! Every lesbian I’ve ever met has that outfit!”

— Casey McQuiston

246. “Jane is spun sugar. A switchblade girl with a cotton-candy heart.”

— Casey McQuiston

247. “Listen, I’m telling you right now, I will physically fight your grandmother myself if I have to, okay? And, like, she’s old. I know I can take her.”

— Casey McQuiston

248. “Saved by God first and her God complex second.”

— Casey McQuiston

249. “What do you say when The Girl tells you that you’re The Girl to her?”

— Casey McQuiston

250. “Alex, you need other friends.” Luna tells him. “Friends who aren’t in Congress.”

— Casey McQuiston