Top 500 Casey McQuiston Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Henry, who can drone on about Lord Byron until you threaten to block his number.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

303. “It’s like I never learned how to just be where I am.”

— Casey McQuiston

304. “You take care of yourself, and that’s important,” her mom says. “And you don’t hurt anyone.” “But I do hurt people,” Chloe insists. “Do you do it on purpose?” “No.” “Okay, then, you’re human.”

— Casey McQuiston

305. “But I’ve kissed your mouth, that corner, that place it goes, so many times now. I’ve memorised it. Topography on the map of you, a world I’m still charting. I know it. I added it to the key. Here: inches to miles. I can multiply it out, read your latitude and longitude. Recite your coordinates like la rosaria.”

— Casey McQuiston

306. “It’s easy to know who you are when you chose once and never changed your mind.”

— Casey McQuiston

307. “I majored in nouns.”

— Casey McQuiston

308. “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

309. “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

310. “ATTN: will be wearing a burgundy velvet suit tonight. please do not attempt to steal my shine. you will fail and i will be embarrassed for you.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

312. “So you like Bake Off, huh?” “It’s just so soothing,” Henry says. “Everything’s all pastel-colored and the music is so relaxing and everyone’s so lovely to one another. And you learn so much about different types of biscuits, Alex.”

— Casey McQuiston

313. “I’m there for whatever you decide you want to do, just, like, let me know if I need to start practicing gazing wistfully out the window, waiting for my love to return from the war.”

— Casey McQuiston

314. “Or his senior year, when he got drunk and made out with Liam in his twin bed for an hour, and he didn’t have a sexual crisis about it – that had to mean he was straight, right? Because if he were into guys, it would have felt scary to be with one, but it wasn’t.”

— Casey McQuiston

315. “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

316. “Come on. I’m trying to give you some advice, from one old man to a much younger version of himself.” “You’re thirty-nine.” “My liver is ninety-three.” “That’s not my fault.” “Some late nights in Denver would beg to differ.”

— Casey McQuiston

317. “Alex wants to go to war for this man, wants to get his hands on everything and everyone that ever hurt him.”

— Casey McQuiston

318. “I don’t think I could possibly have found a more doomed first love, but it’s worth it. It’s probably going to break my heart, and it’s still worth it.”

— Casey McQuiston

319. “5. All the things I understand about myself now because of you.”

— Casey McQuiston

320. “Oh my God,” Chloe says out loud. Her brain is overheating, probably. “I’m in love with a monster turducken.”

— Casey McQuiston

321. “He’s in stupid, unbearable love, and Henry loves him too, and at least for one night it matters, even if they both have to pretend to forget in the morning.”

— Casey McQuiston

322. “And there Henry is, in the flesh, as classically handsome as ever in his tailored three-piece suit, all tousled sandy hair and high cheekbones and a soft, friendly mouth. He holds himself with innately impeccable posture, as if he emerged fully formed and upright out of some.”

— Casey McQuiston

323. “It’s impossible to know if he moves first or if Henry does, but they meet in the middle of the room, Henry’s arms around Alex’s neck, swallowing him up. If Henry’s voice on the phone was a tether, his body is the gravity that makes it possible, his hand gripping the back of Alex’s neck a magnetic force, a permanent compass north.”

— Casey McQuiston

324. “But the minute you need something – like, actually need something- they’ll let you know just how much of a disappointment you are for asking.”

— Casey McQuiston

325. “Of course I’m nervous, Nora, it’s a presidential election and the president gave birth to me.”

— Casey McQuiston

326. “Sit down,” his mother tells him, and Alex feels dread coil deep in his stomach. He has no clue what to expect – knowing your parent as the person who raised you isn’t the same as being able to guess their moves as a world leader. He sits, and the silence hovers over them, his mother’s hands folded in a considering pose against her lips. She looks exhausted. “Are you okay?” she says finally. When he looks up in surprise, there’s no anger in her eyes.”

— Casey McQuiston

327. “It was kind of about what his idea of beauty was. Especially women – he always painted women sort of flowing through space. Girls with an effortless sort of elegance, like they’re weightless and solid at the same time.”

— Casey McQuiston

328. “Which means, of course, the next time August steps on the Q, Jane says, “I think I should kiss you.”

— Casey McQuiston

329. “He knows he would’ve chosen this life for himself given the option; he knows she wouldn’t have.”

— Casey McQuiston

330. “Nothing. Ten long seconds of nothing. “Truly harrowing,” Henry’s voice says tinnily over the speaker.”

— Casey McQuiston

331. “Here they are. Two sets of sneakers on a scrap of metal. Two girls in the middle of a hurricane, tearing down the line. She’s looking up at Jane, and Jane’s looking down at her, and August feels her everywhere, even the places she’s not touching, pressed close as the world roars on.”

— Casey McQuiston

332. “Please don’t be stupid. No part of any of this will ever be uncomplicated. Anyway, you should be a writer. You are a writer.”

— Casey McQuiston

333. “Sometimes August thinks Jane looks like a watercolor painting, fluid and lovely, darker in places, bleeding through the page.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

336. “Hey, Coffee Girl.”

— Casey McQuiston

337. “August sits on the edge of an air mattress in Brooklyn and tries to imagine how it would feel if she didn’t have any of those memories to understand what made her who she is. If she woke up one day and just was and didn’t know why.”

— Casey McQuiston

338. “Isaiah ignores them and continues to yell at August’s tits. “Jane! The party’s not over yet! You should come!”

— Casey McQuiston

339. “So I can offer you all of me, in whatever way you’ll have me, and I can offer you the chance of a life.”

— Casey McQuiston

340. “Can you please sit down?” Zahra says after twenty minutes of watching him twitch around the cabin. “You’re giving my ulcer an ulcer.”

— Casey McQuiston

341. “August takes note after note and finds it almost funny – that all the fighting only conspired to make Jane gentle. Fearsome and flirty and full of bad jokes, an incorrigible sweet tooth and a steel-toe boot as a last resort. That, August is learning, is Jane.”

— Casey McQuiston

342. “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

343. “Shara’s cheeks going pinker and pinker with quiet anger the more Chloe recited without glancing at the page.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

345. “Er,” Henry says, adding to the list of vowel sounds he has to show for himself. It is, unfortunately, also sexy. After all these weeks, the bar is low.”

— Casey McQuiston

346. “She’s glad it’s Shara. Nobody else would have felt important enough.”

— Casey McQuiston

347. “All frogs do is eat bugs that we hate and mind their business. They don’t deserve all that. They’re literally just vibing.”

— Casey McQuiston

348. “His dad wasn’t wrong about how ugly things would get with Richards leading the ticket. Utah ugly, Christian ugly, ugliness couched in dog whistles and toothy white smiles. Right-wing think pieces about entitlement thrown in his and June’s direction, reeking of: Mexicans stole the First Family jobs too.”

— Casey McQuiston

349. “Is this what it’s always like? To want someone and know they want you back? How in the world does anyone get anything done?”

— Casey McQuiston

350. “I go to haunt people but it always turns into a musical number. That’s the energy I want to bring to the hereafter.”

— Casey McQuiston