Top 40 Coco Mellors Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Two parts contentment, one part desire. It seemed a good formula for living, though one she had not mastered yet.”

— Coco Mellors

2. “I’m so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness... Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m not even on that map.”

— Coco Mellors

3. “When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.”

— Coco Mellors

4. “Love looks through spectacles that make copper look like gold, poverty like riches, and tears like pearls.”

— Coco Mellors

5. “Fondness was the best word she could think of to describe what they felt for each other. Fondness was warm but not tepid, the color of amber, more affectionate than friendship but less complicated than love.”

— Coco Mellors

6. “I don’t understand this obsession with happiness,” she said. “Happiness is like the Hollywood sign. It’s big, it’s unattainable, and even if you do make it up there, what’s there to do but come back down?”

— Coco Mellors

7. “Just breathe, Cleo,” Zoe said. “I won’t leave you. I won’t go anywhere. You’re safe.” Cleo smiled into Zoe’s gold-flecked eyes. Everything she had ever wanted to hear from a man was hers from the mouth of a girl.”

— Coco Mellors

8. “The one thing I will not tolerate is absolutely anything less than perfection.”

— Coco Mellors

9. “I tell Frank my favorite painting is Hans Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromewell in the Frick. There’s a patch of carpet in front of it that’s grown bald from the thousands of feet that have stood before it. I tell him I think that’s a good thing to hope for in life, for the carpet to grow thin before you.”

— Coco Mellors

10. “Everybody’s got a hungry heart. The trick is to learn when you’re eating to fill the heart instead of the stomach. Feeding the stomach, she said, is easy. That’s just diet. It’s learning how to feed the heart that’s hard.”

— Coco Mellors

11. “What a thing it must be to be indifferent to indifference.”

— Coco Mellors

12. “It struck her that adult life ws endlessly harsh and exciting, something to be overwhelmed by again and again, like a wave beating her down as she tried to stand.”

— Coco Mellors

13. “We want because we’re wanting. Both senses of the word. The lacking and the longing, all rolled into one. The more you find yourself wanting, the more you want.”

— Coco Mellors

14. “Sweetheart, love is humiliating. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”

— Coco Mellors

15. “He became the hook upon which she hung her whole self.”

— Coco Mellors

16. “All this nonsense about love being a drug, making you feel high, that’s not real. It should hold you like the earth.”

— Coco Mellors

17. “Cleo’s like a cat,” said Frank. “She can touch you, but you can’t touch her. That’s her thing.”

— Coco Mellors

18. “But the people who did get that love, they grew up to be different from us. More secure. Maybe they’re not as shiny or successful as you and I feel we have to be. But it’s not because they’re not interesting. They just don’t feel they have to do the tap dance, you know? They don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be loved. Because they always were.”

— Coco Mellors

19. “What is a wedding, Cleo wondered, if not a private dream made public?”

— Coco Mellors

20. “Why did she feel the need to make everyone, even this waiter, like her? What a thing it must be to be indifferent to indifference.”

— Coco Mellors

21. “Running is for children and thieves.”

— Coco Mellors

22. “She’d learned early that it was quicker to bond with another person over what you didn’t like than what you did, and that the easiest way to feel close to someone was to do something transgressive together. That’s why smokers always made friends.”

— Coco Mellors

23. “People are like this too, you know,” he says eventually. “We break. We put ourselves back together. The cracks are the best part. You don’t have to hide them.”

— Coco Mellors

24. “I want to tell Frank that there is no wrong half, no halves at all in fact, that if there were, we’d be busy halving ourselves again and again until we got to the little square of us that was good and then we would all be free to love and be loved.”

— Coco Mellors

25. “Myke insists on talking to me, despite having no verifiable interest in me as a person at all. I am playing a game with myself where I see how many questions I can ask him until he asks me one in return. So far, I’m at nine. It is like putting coins in a slot machine with no hope of ever getting a prize.”

— Coco Mellors

26. “She had not yet managed the art of being alone in public unselfconsciously, of feeling that she could watch rather than be watched.”

— Coco Mellors

27. “I forgot to tell Frank what the rabbi said about “Thank you” being a prayer. A prayer can be a hope, a request for help, and an act of faith. When I say it to Frank, “Thank you” definitely feels like a prayer.”

— Coco Mellors

28. “He didn’t want to see anymore, he just wanted to feel and be felt, texture on texture.”

— Coco Mellors

29. “She did think she was special, but she wouldn’t have admitted it. She knew enough to know there was nothing less special than thinking you were.”

— Coco Mellors

30. “I guess that’s what life should feel like. Setting off on a long car ride with all your worries and hopes strapped around you, the people who love you most, frantically waving you off as you go.”

— Coco Mellors

31. “Cleo and Frank could not make each other happy, no matter how hard they’d tried.”

— Coco Mellors

32. “People who feel the need to say “I’m fine” are never fine, sweetheart”, she says.”

— Coco Mellors

33. “Fun was fine when you were young, but as you got older it was kindness that counted, kindness that showed up.”

— Coco Mellors

34. “On the back of the bike, the world softened and smeared. She stretched her arms out either side of her and grabbed palms full of solid air. The night was a thousand black butterfly wings beating against her skin. Cleo understood why bikes were so often described as freedom; not for their ability to take you elsewhere, but for the way they transformed the place you already were.”

— Coco Mellors

35. “She looked down and saw hundreds of fragments of her face reflected back, a sliver of cheek, of throat, of eye. Who was she? An artist who didn’t make art. A wife without a husband. A child with no mother.”

— Coco Mellors

36. “She was face down, unfurled in the shape of a star. She looked like a fallen star. He’d flushed her down.”

— Coco Mellors

37. “She was an artist, like you. With a – I don’t know how to say this well – an ego that is large but self-esteem that is small?”

— Coco Mellors

38. “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.”

— Coco Mellors

39. “He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other...”

— Coco Mellors

40. “The thought occured to him that if you listened hard enough in New York, you could always hear a siren. Someone, somewhere, was always getting hurt.”

— Coco Mellors

41. “Don’t victimize yourself under the guise of taking responsibility. That’s not an apology, that’s self-pity.”

— Coco Mellors

42. “Perhaps the real tragedy here is not that George Michael’s heart was given away, but that this beautiful song is relegated to only one month of the year, when its message of unrequited love leading to a deepening resolve to choose more deserving partners is undeniably relevant year-round.”

— Coco Mellors

43. “Her laugh was the sound of a slot-machine jackpot, a soda can cracking open, fairground music in the distance, a Corvette engine coming to life, a thousand hands applauding at once. It was one of those truly beautiful sounds.”

— Coco Mellors

44. “When she slid it over her head, she felt as if she had taken a knife to the surface of the sky, skimmed a little off the bottom, and worn the peel.”

— Coco Mellors

45. “How did a person learn to live? Learn to be happy? She had surrounded herself with people who didn’t know.”

— Coco Mellors

46. “I’ve gotta say,” Ftank said, “I liked him more when I knew him less.”

— Coco Mellors

47. “That was the thing about New York, Cleo thought as they walked toward the buses. It never knew what you wanted, so it offered you everything.”

— Coco Mellors