Top 40 Dana Schwartz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Mortui vivos docent; the dead teach the living.”

— Dana Schwartz

2. “My beating heart is still yours, the letter said, and I’ll be waiting for you.”

— Dana Schwartz

3. “Be patient, be silent, be beautiful and untouched as an orchid, and then and only then will your reward come: a bell jar to keep you safe.”

— Dana Schwartz

4. “You don’t cry anymore, but you don’t feel like yourself anymore either. So start again. Start from infancy, get better, and rebuild an identity for yourself.”

— Dana Schwartz

5. “You get to choose what you want to be. You don’t need skills you were born with or permission. If you want to be an artist or whatever, just work harder than everyone else and become an artist!”

— Dana Schwartz

6. “The next morning, the entire thing feels like a dream. You never see Bill again, never get his number, never find him on Facebook. In fact, like the end of a lazy ghost story, you never find any evidence of his existence at all.”

— Dana Schwartz

7. “Despite pledging to play it cool, your flirting instincts are coming out like an X-Men power you haven’t learned to control. You are the Rogue of flirting. If a guy over six feet tall gets within touching distance of you, your body involuntarily begins to flirt. The government wants to put you on a registry.”

— Dana Schwartz

8. “Tinder fills our need for attention, to be seen by someone, to be wanted, and to not quite know what will happen next. It’s a slot machine pass that you always win: Put in a bit of time and a few swipes, crank the lever, and out comes a parade of choices of people who might call you pretty and say they want to buy you a drink.”

— Dana Schwartz

9. “Yes, yes, yes, yes. Agree to everything, change nothing, come back next week and repeat it all over.”

— Dana Schwartz

10. “There are always women behind the scenes, pulling the strings, Hazel. We are invisible to history, but we also survive.”

— Dana Schwartz

11. “My heart is yours, Hazel Sinnett,” Jack said. “Forever. Beating or still.”

— Dana Schwartz

12. “All progress requires human sacrifice.”

— Dana Schwartz

13. “Hazel Sinnett, you are the most miraculous creature I have ever come across, and I am going to be thinking about how beautiful you are until the day I die.”

— Dana Schwartz

14. “In that moment, I understood Ophelia more than I had in half a semester of my English teacher’s lectures. Whether the boy you love is mad or pretending to be mad, wanting someone you can’t understand or who won’t let you understand will make you go mad yourself. Waiting for his affection was a version of Chinese water torture, desperately waiting for the next drop of any sign that he might like me, unsure when it would come, if it came at all.”

— Dana Schwartz

15. “The only other American is a boy from California whose name and face are equally forgettable, like a contestant on The Bachelorette who’d get eliminated on week two. He.”

— Dana Schwartz

16. “It’s the catch-22 of mental illness: How can your brain not be working right if you’re as goddamn self-aware as you are?”

— Dana Schwartz

17. “She ignores my hilarious joke and continues surveying my room, her fingers playing with the chunky turquoise necklace that sits above her abomination of a coral-colored sweater. She was probably going for “Capable Mom Back in the Workforce!” but the effect is more “Middle-Aged Little Mermaid Cosplayer.”

— Dana Schwartz

18. “Dead bodies are never going to bite you. They’re never going to do anything to you. It’s living things that hurt you.”

— Dana Schwartz

19. “It was an impossible situation, a trick of society as a whole: force women to live at the mercy of whichever man wants them but shame them for anything they might do to get a man to want them.”

— Dana Schwartz

20. “Morte magis metuenda senectus. Do you know Latin, Miss Sinnett?” “Only some, I’m sorry to say. Is it – er – something like, ‘We fear old age – ’?” “’Old age should rather be feared than death.”

— Dana Schwartz

21. “One book? One book? Now you’re being absurd. What if I finish it? Or what if I find it impossibly dull, what then? What am I supposed to read if I either complete the book I brought or I otherwise discover it to be unreadable? Or what if it no longer holds my attention? Someone could spill tea on it. There. Think of that. Someone could spill tea on my one book, and then I would be marooned.”

— Dana Schwartz

22. “Being a woman had closed many doors to Hazel Sinnett, but it had also revealed to her a valuable tool in her arsenal: women were almost entirely overlooked as people, which gave her the power of invisibility. People saw women, they saw the dresses women wore on public walks through the park, and the gloved hands they rested on their suitors’ elbows at the theater, but women were never threats.”

— Dana Schwartz

23. “What were miracles, but science that man didn’t yet understand?”

— Dana Schwartz

24. “What were miracles, but science that man didn’t yet understand? And didn’t that make it all the more miraculous that the secrets of the universe were out there, codes one might decipher if smart enough, tenacious enough?”

— Dana Schwartz

25. “Love is nothing but the prolonged agony of waiting for it to end. The fear of losing the ones we love makes us do selfish and foolish and cruel things. The only freedom is freedom from love, and once your love is gone, it can be perfect, crystallized in your memory forever.”

— Dana Schwartz

26. “The physician works with his mind. The surgeon works with his hands, and his brute strength.”

— Dana Schwartz

27. “Yeah,” Hazel responded with the most masculine swagger she could manage. “I do. And the ladies seem to like it just fine.”

— Dana Schwartz

28. “I believe you shall do great things.” He said it like he said almost everything, just a statement of fact.”

— Dana Schwartz

29. “We men fear death. Death! Gruesome and terrible! Inevitable and senseless! We dance towards her as we might a beautiful woman and Death waltzes back towards us, beckoning, always beckoning. Once the veil is pierced, we never return.”

— Dana Schwartz

30. “I used to be so confident. That’s the funny thing: I used to think that I knew everything, that I could do anything. And then you see it firsthand, and you realize how thin the line is between everything being all right and everything being ruined forever and you just become suddenly aware that you know nothing. I’m just a silly little girl playing dress-up and pretending.”

— Dana Schwartz

31. “Someone should tell you you’re beautiful every time the sun comes up. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Wednesdays. And at teatime. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve and the evening before Christmas Eve, and on Easter. He should tell you on Guy Fawkes Night and on New Year’s, and on the eigth of August, just because.”

— Dana Schwartz

32. “Passivity was the ultimate virtue.”

— Dana Schwartz

33. “She could say she had a headache. Or she was feeling faint. No one seemed to ask too many questions about a woman feeling faint, nor about the broader cultural phenomenon of an entire society of women who seemed to swoon en masse.”

— Dana Schwartz

34. “She had gotten love, and that was more than plenty of people got on this planet.”

— Dana Schwartz

35. “Even sinners deserved a headstone.”

— Dana Schwartz

36. “Being a woman had closed many doors.”

— Dana Schwartz

37. “That’s the thing about this sort of thing: a sharp bit of hurt now to save a lot of hurt adding up over time.”

— Dana Schwartz

38. “Let him spend every night in the dirt if it meant getting his mornings with her.”

— Dana Schwartz

39. “I’ve taken you for a lot of things, but a fool was never one of them.”

— Dana Schwartz

40. “You will always have to watch people you love die,” Marie-Anne said. “Do you think mortality protects you from that?”

— Dana Schwartz

41. “And there seems to be so little interest in the public when it’s the poor who die. So few who care.”

— Dana Schwartz

42. “Do not play games with your future. It permits the possibility of losing.”

— Dana Schwartz

43. “While Davey tugged the rope, Munro, still in the grave, helped to guide the body out of the small hole in the coffin and back toward the surface world, a strange reverse birth for a body past death.”

— Dana Schwartz