Top 200 Deb Caletti Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “This is what happens when nice people are pushed too far. We give too many chances, and so when we’ve finally had enough, we are well and truly done. When a nice person shuts a door on you, it’s shut for good.”

— Deb Caletti

2. “That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.”

— Deb Caletti

3. “Stereotypes are fast and easy, but they are lies, and the truth takes its time.”

— Deb Caletti

4. “I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.”

— Deb Caletti

5. “Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.”

— Deb Caletti

6. “Sometimes you’ve got to make a mess before you clean it up.”

— Deb Caletti

7. “It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn’t have something in the first place. I guess that’s what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.”

— Deb Caletti

8. “I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn’t a final destination. You don’t one day get there and get to stay.”

— Deb Caletti

9. “Love can come when you’re already who you are, when you’re filled with you. Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space.”

— Deb Caletti

10. “I shouldn’t have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn’t be so afraid of losing someone that I’ll do anything to make them stay.”

— Deb Caletti

11. “You’ve got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn’t define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don’t have to struggle to be good enough for.”

— Deb Caletti

12. “I’ve heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this.”

— Deb Caletti

13. “We should not give away a moment to anyone who does not deserve it.”

— Deb Caletti

14. “Most people, it seems like they’ve only got one part of the equation down. Caring for themselves, or caring for someone else. And I’v learned how important it is to have both.”

— Deb Caletti

Featured in: Caring Quotes

15. “Marriage is like a well-built porch. If one of the two posts leans too much, the porch collapses. So each must be strong enough to stand on its own.”

— Deb Caletti

Featured in: Strong Quotes

16. “People are secretive when they have secrets.”

— Deb Caletti

17. “If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.”

— Deb Caletti

18. “It made me wonder how many times we forgive just because we don’t want to lose someone, even if they don’t deserve our forgiveness.”

— Deb Caletti

19. “An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean.”

— Deb Caletti

20. “The most insane things can become normal if you have them around you long enough. A mind can’t seem to hold anything too crazy for too long without finding a way to make it seem normal.”

— Deb Caletti

21. “You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make- your very heartbeat, almost.”

— Deb Caletti

22. “My subconscious speaks in a foreign language.”

— Deb Caletti

23. “But my apology was a thousand apologies.”

— Deb Caletti

24. “The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.”

— Deb Caletti

25. “Anyway, madness and genius. They’re the disturbed pals of the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar. Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow.”

— Deb Caletti

26. “But sometimes, too, you have this little feeling of knowing, this fuzzy, gnawing sense that someone will become a major something in your life. You just know that theirs will be a life you will enter and become a part of.”

— Deb Caletti

27. “It’s good to let God pick a man for you. We don’t do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package.”

— Deb Caletti

28. “Those questions you have? Whether he’s the one, whether you feel about him the way you should, or whether the relationship is going okay? When you’re not sure whether you’re in love with someone or not, the answer is not.”

— Deb Caletti

29. “You could put your confusion and upset and worries into whatever book you were reading. You could sort of set them down in there, and you could come out with your head on a little straighter. I don’t why stories worked that way, but they did.”

— Deb Caletti

30. “A lady I will be, but a man’s accessory, his handbag, no thank you. I will not be someone’s ornament. I will not just be someone’s honey, baby, sweetheart.”

— Deb Caletti

31. “The most true-love words are not the ones that grasp and hold and bind you, twisting you both up together in some black dance. No, they are ones that leave you free to stand alone on your own solid ground, leave him to do the same, a tender space between you.”

— Deb Caletti

32. “Cool superiority as a mask for overflowing insecurity.”

— Deb Caletti

33. “We can get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.”

— Deb Caletti

34. “Because words were hills and valleys you traveled, so lovely sometimes that they hurt your eyes.”

— Deb Caletti

35. “Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.”

— Deb Caletti

36. “This is not to say I don’t feel my own grief, which can hit powerfully at unexpected times. It’s just that the telling does not automatically bring on my own upset, as people assume. I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing.”

— Deb Caletti

37. “My father said that love at first sight should send you running, if you know what’s good for you. It’s your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces, he says. You’re an idiot if you think it means you’ve met your soul mate. So I was an idiot.”

— Deb Caletti

38. “Yeah. When you want what’s real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.”

— Deb Caletti

39. “Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.”

— Deb Caletti

40. “The scariest part of forever is that nothing is.”

— Deb Caletti

41. “Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless.”

— Deb Caletti

42. “It’s hard to see clearly when your eyes are squinched tight out of fear.”

— Deb Caletti

43. “And pity – people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you – that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful people.”

— Deb Caletti

44. “Because that’s how it works after something terrible has happened. You know this is true if something terrible has ever happened to you. A thousand objects take on new meaning. Everything is a reminder of something else.”

— Deb Caletti

45. “Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you’re at the end of the book, and it’s only the end of a chapter.”

— Deb Caletti

46. “The most basic and somehow forgettable thing is this: Love is not pain. Love is goodness. And real love – it’s less shiny than solid and simple.”

— Deb Caletti

Featured in: Real Quotes

47. “I tended to give a book a chance and another chance and another, sometimes seeing it all the way to the end, still hoping for for it turn out different. Maybe I was confused about what you owed a book. What you owed people, for that matter, real or fictional.”

— Deb Caletti

48. “Empathy took the edge off, and the truth is, we need our edge. Our edge is trying to speak to us, and we are too, too good at shutting it up.”

— Deb Caletti

49. “Rejection, though – it could make the loss of someone you weren’t even that crazy about feel gut wrenching and world ending.”

— Deb Caletti

50. “If you look up “charming” in the dictionary, you’ll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?”

— Deb Caletti

Featured in: Strong Quotes