Top 80 Coco Mellors Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.”

— Coco Mellors

52. “Once you get to my age, you will learn that you can take a lot of wrong turns and still end up in the right place.” “I don’t.”

— Coco Mellors

53. “He tapped his forehead. “Most dangerous neighborhood I know.”

— Coco Mellors

54. “Could you fall out of love with life if you were never in love with it?”

— Coco Mellors

55. “She was hardly the kind of glittering person Frank liked to see himself reflected in.”

— Coco Mellors

56. “Around her sisters, she was always the eldest, which meant, in comparison to them, she was never young.”

— Coco Mellors

57. “Avery had previously thought love was built on large, visible gestures, but a marriage turned out to be the accrual of ordinary, almost inconsequential, acts of daily devotion – washing the mugs left in the sink before bed, taking the time to run up or downstairs to kiss each other quickly before one left the house, cutting up an extra piece of fruit to share – acts easy to miss, but if ever gone, deeply missed.”

— Coco Mellors

58. “No expectations. No preferences. If you prefer one outcome over another in life, you will likely be disappointed. I prefer nothing and am always surprised.”

— Coco Mellors

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

— Coco Mellors

60. “She hates authority but loves structure.”

— Coco Mellors

61. “I know,” said Bonnie. “I love you too. Without the too.” It was what Nicky used to say to them. No too. Just love.”

— Coco Mellors

62. “What did I tell you about what other people think?” asks my mother. “‘So what?’” I say. “Exactly.”

— Coco Mellors

63. “What men feared most was pity, and what women feared most was envy. For a guy, envy can be empowering. But for a girl, it just means you’re going to get attacked or excluded.”

— Coco Mellors

64. “I think you’re the opposite of insufferable, I suffer you gladly.”

— Coco Mellors

65. “Her sister curled in on herself, as though she could make herself small enough for the hurt not to find her.”

— Coco Mellors

66. “I know we want to make sense of what she did, and blaming ourselves for not doing more is one way to do that, but none of us could have changed what happened to her.” She thought of what their mother had said. “None of us are that important.”

— Coco Mellors

67. “The concert was three hours of heaven, all of them scream-singing the words to every song along with thousands of other girls, lifted together on a tide of riotous, unapologetic joy, the feeling that to be a girl with other girls was not some weakness, as they had been told, but a power, the best and luckiest power on earth.”

— Coco Mellors

68. “That was the thing about him. He noticed that. He noticed people. It was his gift. Or really, it was the gift he gave you, to be seen.”

— Coco Mellors

69. “Love and pain, those were the only disciplinarians she knew in the ring and in life. But love had died when Nicky did, then again when her sisters turned on each other, and again when Pavel looked at her as though she were a stranger. Which left her with pain. That, she could deliver from the heart.”

— Coco Mellors

70. “Their family had always been good at hellos and goodbyes, moments ending even as they began. It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.”

— Coco Mellors

71. “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

72. “That was family, she thought sadly, the root of all comfort and chaos.”

— Coco Mellors

73. “Of course it had not been for her. And there it was, the feeling she had been trying to deny, the dark, oily jealousy rising in her that Frank would do for Eleanor what he would never do for her. Eleanor got this version of Frank, the sober, thoughtful man who took her suggestions, while Cleo had endured the drunken predecessor like a fool.”

— Coco Mellors

74. “None of us really know what another is going through until that person feels able to share the truth of their lived experience.”

— Coco Mellors

75. “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

76. “You never have to explain yourself to sisters.”

— Coco Mellors

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

— Coco Mellors

78. “That was the thing people didn’t talk about, how much of life was just filling time.”

— Coco Mellors

79. “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

80. “I believe that everything happens,” she said. “Period. Or full stop, as you would say. That’s it. Things happen and we have to learn to live with them, as long as suicide is off the table, that is. If we can find meaning in them, fine, but even if we can’t, we still have to live with them. The meaning is an afterthought, an anesthesia. Happens is the only word in that statement that’s empirical. The rest is whatever helps you sleep at night.”

— Coco Mellors

81. “What do you give to a man who has everything? Antibiotics.”

— Coco Mellors

82. “Everything I do is to protect you. I taught you all to swim. You know who taught me? No one! I had to pick it up myself, or I’d drown.”

— Coco Mellors

83. “She was surprised by how natural and light her voice sounded. It frightened her how easy it was to fake her own happiness.”

— Coco Mellors

84. “Go lightly, go lightly, go lightly.”

— Coco Mellors

85. “The problem with her pain was that it was invisible. Avery wished she could have given it crutches, some object that made it obvious to everyone around her, but she had learned now that most pain is private.”

— Coco Mellors

86. “Oh Jesus, how I adore you.”

— Coco Mellors

87. “I wish I had my mother’s God, actually. Not all the Jehovah’s Witness stuff she practices, that’s a bit much for me. But she believes in something that believes in her – or at least she believes it believes in her. And it comforts her, I can tell. I envy her that.”

— Coco Mellors