Top 40 Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You are only as happy as your unhappiest child.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

2. “She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

3. “Sometimes a small change could make all the difference.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

4. “Everyone’s always on the hunt for a mirror. It’s basic psychology. You want to see yourself reflected in others. Others – your sister, your parents – they want to look at you and see themselves. They want you to be a flattering reflection of them – and vice-versa. It’s normal. I suppose it’s really normal if you’re a twin. But being somebody else’s mirror? That is not your job.” Nora.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

5. “If you want to predict a person’s behavior, identify his or her incentives. Leo.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

6. “She believed in second chances, sometimes more than first chances, which were wasted on youth and indiscretion.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

7. “Parents are temporary custodians, keeping watch and offering love and trying to leave the child better than they found him.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

8. “Nothing was a sure thing; every choice was just an educated guess, or a leap into a mysterious abyss. People might not change but their incentives could. So.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

9. “I you want people to judge you based on the inside, don’t distract them from the outside.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

10. “She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

11. “I hate wearing flats,” she said, tugging her fitted white blouse a little lower. “They make me feel flat all over.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

12. “People might not change but their incentives could.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

13. “I’m curious,” he said, “is telling someone to relax ever helpful? It’s like saying ‘breathe’ to someone who is hyperventilating or ‘swallow’ to a person who’s choking. It’s a completely useless admonition.” “I.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

14. “It’s not your job to be anyone’s mirror.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

15. “Everyone’s always on the hunt for a mirror. It’s basic psychology. You want to see yourself reflected in others.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

16. “Accommodation. A different and sturdier kind of nest. AS.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

17. “This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else’s misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people’s lives.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

18. “She was open to love, but she was best at managing her own happiness; it was other people’s happiness that sunk her.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

19. “They’d fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It’s addicts stayed addicts.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

20. “People abandoned one another constantly without performing the courtesy of of actually disappearing. They left, but didn’t, lurking about, a constant reminder of what could or should have been.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

21. “Too often, she looked forward to the end of something – to beginning the remembering – more than the thing itself.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

22. “It was stupid, she now understood, to think that privilege translated to protection. To mistake privilege for grace.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

23. “Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn’t rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

24. “His love for her was quiet and constant, familiar and soothing; it was almost its own thing entirely, like a worn rock or a set of worry beads, something he’d pick up and weigh in his palm occasionally, more comforting than dispiriting.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

25. “The shelf held nothing of value and it held everything of value. It was the past they’d both endured and escaped. It was despair and hope. It was life and death.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

26. “Bad things happened. The people closest to you surprised you in the most disappointing ways.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

27. “Was it a thing, Flora wondered, that just happened to charismatic men – or maybe all men – how the world around them seemed to bend to their wants and needs?”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

28. “You have to fool yourself before you can fool the audience.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

29. “American Buffalo.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

30. “I used to read three newspapers every morning. Three.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

31. “He loved nothing more than a dimly lit bar on a sunny afternoon.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

32. “Decades of behavioral blunders and ill-conceived marriages and businesses run amok had left next to nothing by the time Leonard was in high school. He’d wangled himself an engineering scholarship to Cornell and then a job with Dow Chemical during a time he referred to, reverently, as the Dawn of the Absorbency Revolution.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

33. “Leo was reciting from the album covers: “Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis, Paula Abdul? This is like a bad MTV segment of ‘Where Are They Now?’” “More like, guess who joined the Columbia House Record Club.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

34. “In some inexplicable way she’d been looking forward to it and all its attendant drama, because wasn’t there something nearly lovely – when you were young enough – about guts churning and tear ducts being put to glorious overuse?”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

35. “He missed Stephanie, the ease between them, her solid and comforting presence. Sitting across from him, in the light of the fire, she blazed with health and well-being and good humor. “I.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

36. “In the coming weeks, he would spend a lot of time trying to unpack that moment, not understanding himself how years of commitment and love and tolerance could just vanish. But they did.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

37. “And just like that, she felt like the General again.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

38. “Neither of them even had time to scream.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

39. “One of the many qualities she and her mother shared was a mutual love for an event concluded. It was an inclination she fought all her life. She loved a party best when it was over and the house had been restored to order and she could sit in the quiet and replay the evening. Too often, she looked forward to the end of something-to beginning the remembering-more than the thing itself.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

40. “Was that how every couple functioned after time? Seeing the contours of someone else’s intelligence so much more easily than your own?”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

41. “The cars on the block were already hidden under a sodden layer of white. People were shoveling their walks and.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

42. “They’re all kind of weird.” “Everybody’s kind of weird.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

43. “They marveled over how they could bring her to any restaurant and she’d try almost any food; she’d scarf down olives, caper berries, and stinky cheese and lovingly suck on a piece of lemon.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

44. “He was doing everyone a favor by getting out of town, he thought. People abandoned one another constantly without performing the courtesy of actually disappearing. They left but they didn’t, lurking about, a constant reminder of what could or should or might have been. Not him.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

45. “Being somebody’s looking glass is not your job.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

46. “Sometimes the dreams clung to Bea all day, leaving her unsettled and jittery, gloomy. Like today.”

— Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney