Top 500 Casey McQuiston Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “At cruising altitude, he takes the chain off his neck and slides the ring on next to the old house key. They clink together gently as he tucks them both under his shirt, two homes side by side.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Casey McQuiston

207. “Myla spits in the sink. “Comatose in California is my favorite Lana Del Rey album.”

— Casey McQuiston

208. “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

209. “If there’s any legacy for me on this earth, I want it to be true.”

— Casey McQuiston

210. “She was beautiful like a city you always wanted to go to, like how you wait years and years for the right time, and then as soon as you get there, you have to taste everything and touch everything and learn every street by name. I felt like I knew her. She reminded me who I was. She had soft lips and green eyes and a body that wouldn’t quit. Hair like you wouldn’t believe. Stubborn, sharp as a knife. And I never, ever wanted a person to save me until she did.”

— Casey McQuiston

211. “If it weren’t for her morning meditation sessions, Alex is sure his mom would have throttled an aide by now.”

— Casey McQuiston

212. “It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration. For God’s sake, put some clothes on.”

— Casey McQuiston

213. “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

214. “She was walking through the shelves and imagining herself there one day, one spine tucked alongside all the others, fitting in perfectly.”

— Casey McQuiston

215. “Love, Henry has found, has a way of growing backward. You fall in love with a person in the present, and then every person you’ve ever been gets to fall in love with every past version of them.”

— Casey McQuiston

216. “In an instant of sudden, vivid clarity, he can’t believe he ever thought he was straight.”

— Casey McQuiston

217. “She ran away because she didn’t think she could make her family happy and she never went back because she thought she did them a favor. She kept running because she never quite learned what home was supposed to feel like.”

— Casey McQuiston

218. “He likes taking Henry apart, but there’s something incredibly intimate about sitting on the bed they wrecked te night before.”

— Casey McQuiston

219. “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

220. “While she does like boys, she generally finds the traits of a compelling villain – arrogance, malice, an angsty backstory – tedious in a man. Like, what do hot guys with long dark hair even have to be that upset about? Get a clarifying shampoo and suck it up, Kylo Ren. So your rich parents sent you to magic camp and you didn’t make any friends. Big deal.”

— Casey McQuiston

221. “Aw, little buddy,” Nora says. She reaches over and pats his hand. “It’s cute how you think everything is about you.” “It should be, honestly.” “That’s the spirit.”

— Casey McQuiston

222. “Which leaves June, next to him, leaning on one elbow with her nose buried in the issue of People she’s inexplicably brought with them. She always chooses the most bizarre reading material for flights. Last time, it was a battered old Cantonese phrase book. Before that, Death Comes for the Archbishop.”

— Casey McQuiston

223. “I’d like to be just like Princess Leia when I’m older because she’s so tough and smart and strong, and she gets to kiss Han Solo.”

— Casey McQuiston

224. “I do think I got a gut feeling with you, I just didn’t have what I needed in my head to understand it. But I kind of kept chasing it anyway, like I was going blindly in a certain direction and hoping for the best.”

— Casey McQuiston

225. “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

226. “God Save the Queen.”

— Casey McQuiston

227. “I always liked Luke. He’s brave and good, and he’s the strongest Jedi of them all. I think Luke is proof that it doesn’t matter where you come from or who your family is – you can always be great if you’re true to yourself.”

— Casey McQuiston

228. “This is it. October 2, 2020, and the whole world watched, and history remembered.”

— Casey McQuiston

229. “His Royal Highness Prince Henry wonders if you would do him the honor of accompanying him for a dance.”

— Casey McQuiston

230. “Okay, but, uh, what if they escape? I’ve seen Jurassic Park. Did you know birds are directly descended from raptors? That’s a scientific fact. Raptors in my bedroom, Henry. And you want me to go to sleep like they’re not gonna bust out of their enclosures and take over the island the minute I close my eyes? Okay. Maybe your white ass.”

— Casey McQuiston

231. “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

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

— Casey McQuiston

233. “You want to take what you were given and leave the world better than you found it. So do I. We can – we can figure out a way to do that together.”

— Casey McQuiston

234. “It’s incredible and baffling, the way Henry’s confidence comes in waves like this, how he struggles so much to get through the asking for what he wants and then readily takes it the moment he’s given permission, like at the bar, how the right push had him dancing and shouting as if he’d been waiting for someone to tell him he was allowed to do it.”

— Casey McQuiston

235. “Hi, love,” he hears Henry say quietly, privately, right into the hair above his ear, and Alex’s breath forgets how to do anything but laugh helplessly.”

— Casey McQuiston

236. “August, we’re adults. Just say you got your back blown out.”

— Casey McQuiston

237. “Henry looks Philip square in the face and says, “I’ve been gay as a maypole since the day I came out of Mum, Philip.”

— Casey McQuiston

238. “God, Shall I compare thee to an icebox pie? Couldn’t be gayer if she tried.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

240. “August es un momento, un lugar y una persona.”

— Casey McQuiston

241. “There are things out there for you that you haven’t even thought of yet, that you don’t even know how to think of yet. Who you are here doesn’t have to be the same as who you are out there. And if the person you feel like you have to be in this town doesn’t feel right to you, you’re allowed to leave. You’re allowed to exist. Even if it means existing somewhere else.”

— Casey McQuiston

242. “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

243. “She feels like spine of a book about to crack and spill out all the love story guts.”

— Casey McQuiston

244. “Everything was put in a specific place for a reason. Everything has a meaning, an intention.”

— Casey McQuiston

245. “Anderson Cooper, you handsome bastard.”

— Casey McQuiston

246. “I know how it goes! We all age out of our parents’ insurance, and all of a sudden your friends stop having time to hang out because they have a person and that’s their best friend now, and they have a kid, and they move to the suburbs and you never see them again because you’re a lonely old spinster-.”

— Casey McQuiston

247. “Fearsome and flirty and full of bad jokes, an incorrigible sweet tooth and a steel-toe boot as a last resort.”

— Casey McQuiston

248. “She’s not an idea anymore – she’s Jane, hardheaded Jane, runaway Jane, smart-mouthed Jane, bruise-knuckled, soft-hearted agitator Jane. The girl stuck on the line with August’s heart in the pocket of her ratty jeans.”

— Casey McQuiston

249. “I saw myself in the rearview mirror of a person I’ve loved since I was thirteen, and I felt endless. Like, Holy Spirit endless. Maybe that’s what it means to feel like myself.”

— Casey McQuiston

250. “She moves like art. She finds every piece holding August together and works it loose until she feels like she’s spilling out of herself. August’s at sea, she’s clay in the hands of someone who knows how to make a life out of nothing, she’s a girl underneath a girl in a bed they both almost died to get to.”

— Casey McQuiston