Top 500 Casey McQuiston Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “I’m taking a picture of a gay landmark, and also a statue.”

— Casey McQuiston

352. “If they’re gonna kill you, get their DNA under your fingernails.”

— Casey McQuiston

353. “I honestly have never felt like I deserved to choose. But you treat me like I do.”

— Casey McQuiston

354. “So it goes, and Henry is there, in his head and his lecture notes and his cubicle, every single stupid day, no matter how many shots of espresso he puts in his coffee.”

— Casey McQuiston

355. “What it would be like to have someone bite down a smile when they point and say, “Yeah, her. She’s mine” To live alongside someone, to kiss and be kissed, to be wanted.”

— Casey McQuiston

356. “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

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

— Casey McQuiston

358. “He’s like a cardboard cutout of a person.”

— Casey McQuiston

359. “Shame is a way of life here. It’s stocked in the vending machines, stuck like gum under the desks, spoken in the morning devotionals. She knows now that there’s a bit of it in her.”

— Casey McQuiston

360. “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

361. “Maybe it’s that she’s starting to feel like an extra in an extremely low-budget Love Actually, surrounded by people loving and being loved in all their messy, unpredictable ways, and she doesn’t trust or understand it.”

— Casey McQuiston

362. “To family,” Niko says. “And viva Puerto Rico libre.”

— Casey McQuiston

363. “Her eyes are bright and teasing and warm, warm forever-and-ever brown, and August doesn’t know how she could possibly do anything but whatever this girl says.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

365. “No booty calls,′ Alex tells him, and Henry chokes on a laugh.”

— Casey McQuiston

366. “She throws herself down the subway stairs, races to the platform, and there, somehow in perfect alignment with the universe, is the Q waiting for her with doors open. She lunges onto the train as they slide shut. Momentum carries her across the aisle, and she smacks into the opposite side of the car, startling a drunk couple so much, they nearly drop their takeout. To her right, a voice says, “Hell of an entrance, Coffee Girl.”

— Casey McQuiston

367. “I majored in nouns.”

— Casey McQuiston

368. “When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir – we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand.”

— Casey McQuiston

369. “He smiles as he reaches for a frying pan, because he knows it’s exactly the kind of insane risk he can’t resist.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

371. “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

372. “He used to sit in front of the living room TV and color each state in with red and blue magic markers as the night went on, allowed to stay up hours past his bedtime for one blessed night at age ten to watch Obama beat McCain.”

— Casey McQuiston

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “Listen, they look best on my ass. The J. Crew ones wrinkle all weird. And they’re not khakis, they’re chinos. Khakis are for white people.”

— Casey McQuiston

378. “There’s no point to it, loving a girl who can’t touch the ground.”

— Casey McQuiston

379. “But it’s too late. She could live another fifty years, love and leave a hundred cities, press her fingertips into a thousand turnstiles and plane tickets, and Jane would still be there at the bottom of her heart.”

— Casey McQuiston

380. “There are fireflies winking around his head, landing in his hair. A crown. His dive is infuriatingly graceful.”

— Casey McQuiston

381. “Bad thing – Mom, I saw the new art in the hall on the second floor, and I need to know why you allowed a George W. Bush terrier painting in our home.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

383. “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

384. “It was never a crush, if she’s being honest, not since she started planning her mornings around a girl she didn’t even know.”

— Casey McQuiston

385. “Shara wirft Dinge nicht weg, weil sie ihr nichts bedeuten. Sie wirft sie weg, weil sie zu viel bedeuten.”

— Casey McQuiston

386. “Alex lies awake that night, drunk on Shiner and way too many campfire marshmallows, and he stares at whorls in the wood panels of the top bunk and thinks about coming of age out here. He remembers when he was a kid, freckly and unafraid, when the world seemed like it was blissfully endless but everything still made perfect sense. He used to leave his clothes in a pile on the pier and dive headfirst into the lake. Everything was in its right place.”

— Casey McQuiston

387. “I don’t think I’m allowed back on Long Island after I dropped that jar of spiders on the LIRR,” Niko says.”

— Casey McQuiston

388. “Your pants are in the window by the TV,” says a voice, much too clear and much too loud for the hangover bog. August looks up, and there’s Lucie, glitter lingering around her eyes, glowering into the cabinets. “You said, ‘They need to get some air.”

— Casey McQuiston

389. “Jane tilts her head to look at her. She’s got this ability to move between pretty and handsome from moment to moment, a subtle difference in the way she holds her chin or the set of her mouth. Right now, she’s the prettiest girl August has ever seen.”

— Casey McQuiston

390. “Alex paces the solarium and listens to Henry talk, stories about a man with Henry’s same sandy hair and strong, straight nose, someone Alex has met in shadows that pass through the way Henry speaks and moves and laughs.”

— Casey McQuiston

391. “I think it’s amazing,” Nora says. “Sworn enemies forced to make peace to settle tensions between their countries? There’s something totally Shakespearean about it.”

— Casey McQuiston

392. “He looks transformed in the lamplight, like a god of debauchery, painted gold with his hair all mussed up and his eyes heavy-lidded.”

— Casey McQuiston

393. “I learned that survival is heavy on so many of us. And on a personal level, I realized I’d gotten so used to that weight, I stopped noticing how much of myself I’d dedicated to carrying it.”

— Casey McQuiston

394. “He notices David Beckham in a well-tailored suit – once again, how had he convinced himself he was straight?”

— Casey McQuiston

395. “If I can give my whole heart to love without fearing the cost, I will regret nothing.”

— Casey McQuiston

396. “Instead, he is in a prison of his own creation, sworn to babysit these turkeys until the pardoning ceremony, and is just now realizing his deep-seated fear of large birds.”

— Casey McQuiston

397. “Or she’s starting a new life with a man named Raoul. Or she left to get a nose job and is recuperating in a subterranean labyrinth beneath an opera house in France.”

— Casey McQuiston

398. “She kept running because she never quite learned what home was supposed to feel like. That, especially, August can understand.”

— Casey McQuiston

399. “Jane laughs, which is rocketing straight up August’s list of favorite sounds in the universe. She’s gonna trap it in a shell like a sea witch. It’s fine.”

— Casey McQuiston

400. “Is this too much mist?” Theo asks. “I feel like I’m at a Rainforest Cafe.” “No, it’s nice,” I say, watching a drop of water roll down the side of their neck. “Like being a cucumber in a grocery store.”

— Casey McQuiston