Top 500 Casey McQuiston Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “I majored in nouns.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

354. “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

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

— Casey McQuiston

356. “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

357. “Jane es la primera persona que la ha hecho sentir alguna vez como John Cusack e Ione Skye a la vez.”

— Casey McQuiston

358. “Oh, Alex thinks. “Oh,” Alex says.”

— Casey McQuiston

359. “Which is how he ends up in his J. Crew best on a Saturday at the Greenwich Polo Club, wondering what the hell he’s gotten himself into. The woman in front of him is wearing a hat with an entire taxidermied pigeon on it. High school lacrosse did not prepare him for this kind of sporting event.”

— Casey McQuiston

360. “Hey, Coffee Girl.”

— Casey McQuiston

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Casey McQuiston

364. “You know what’s funny?” she muses. “How sometimes you look at a man and it’s like, Oh, yeah, that. And then you look at a woman and it’s like, Ooh, yes, this.”

— Casey McQuiston

365. “She lived because she wanted to. There’s nothing she can’t do.”

— Casey McQuiston

366. “Yep. And for the record, making it was one of the most depressing moments of my career.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

368. “Henry is one talented bastard. A man of many hidden gifts, Alex muses half hysterically. A true prodigy. God save the queen.”

— Casey McQuiston

369. “Her eyes have this way of swallowing up the grimy fluorescent light of the train and transforming it into something new. Right now, when she looks at August: stars. The goddamn Milky Way.”

— Casey McQuiston

370. “From the moment I arrived at Willow Grove, I was confident I would spend the next 4 years of my high school career counting the days until I could escape this place, which has the spiritual aura of a Mountain Dew bottle filled with dip spit in the tour bus cup holder of a Christian Rock Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band.”

— Casey McQuiston

371. “I wanted to see the world but still have one thing that was mine.”

— Casey McQuiston

372. “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

373. “Kind of,” she says. And, “Pull my hair.” For a few ringing seconds, August imagines herself melting onto the floor of the train like the ghosts of a million spilled subway slushies and dropped ice cream cones. Completely under control.”

— Casey McQuiston

374. “Every time something terrible happens to you from then on, it doesn’t just stop at the bottom – it goes all the way down.”

— Casey McQuiston

375. “This is what I get for assuming all women in safari hats can be trusted.”

— Casey McQuiston

376. “It sounds like you did your best.”

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Casey McQuiston

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

— Casey McQuiston

390. “New York takes from her, sometimes. But she takes too. She takes its muggy air in fistfuls, and she packs it into the cracks in her heart.”

— Casey McQuiston

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Casey McQuiston

394. “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

395. “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

396. “August Landry does not trust people, but she trusts fried chicken.”

— Casey McQuiston

397. “He tells his too-fast brain: Don’t miss it this time. He’s too important.”

— Casey McQuiston

398. “Maybe he can absorb some of the ‘much’ from the place where their shoulders are pressed together.”

— Casey McQuiston

399. “The skin is soft, probably exfoliated and moisturized daily by some royal manicurist.”

— Casey McQuiston

400. “Have you ever notices I have never once approached you and have been exhaustively civil every time we’ve spoken? Yet here you are, seeking me out again.” He takes a sip of his champagne. “Simply an observation.”

— Casey McQuiston