Top 200 Deb Caletti Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.”

— Deb Caletti

152. “Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can’t, is all.”

— Deb Caletti

153. “Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you’d come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains.”

— Deb Caletti

154. “They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear.”

— Deb Caletti

155. “Fear was the biggest bullshitter, he’d said. But sometimes, too, fear told the truth.”

— Deb Caletti

156. “A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as feisty; we are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love – it is not the book itself, but the binding. It can rip us apart or hold us together... Layers, by their nature, are fragile things.”

— Deb Caletti

157. “I knew something else, too: It’s human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it’s also arrogant.”

— Deb Caletti

158. “I became a writer because I love books, and I believe in their power.”

— Deb Caletti

159. “When you go looking for rescue, you end up trapped in your own weakness.”

— Deb Caletti

160. “Sometimes I’ve even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.”

— Deb Caletti

161. “It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting.”

— Deb Caletti

162. “More, much more, will happen after this. Things involving maps and books and true love and tragedy, tragedy like you wouldn’t believe. But fine things too. The best ones.”

— Deb Caletti

163. “I don’t know why we insist on pain when pain is so often easy to eliminate. It’s funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we’ve committed some crime.”

— Deb Caletti

164. “There are so many different fifteens. And eighteens. And forty-twos, for that matter. Mature fifteens and young fifteens and wise fifteens and lost fifteens. And angry fifteens.”

— Deb Caletti

165. “What came next wasn’t exactly silence, because although it was quiet, a thousand things were being said. I hated that part about an unhappy household – that feeling of being perched and listening, the way an animal must feel at night in the dark, assessing danger.”

— Deb Caletti

166. “Maybe she could quit her big job of being responsible for everyone else’s feelings... She imagines it – letting go. Handing the heavy stuff back to the people it belongs to.”

— Deb Caletti

167. “Maybe some people just had trouble with forever.”

— Deb Caletti

168. “It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don’t realize how fast this acutally happens, and it’s kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think about it. And it makes you realize there’s absolutely no way to avoid change. You can sit there and cross your arms and refuse it, but underneath you, things are still spinning away.”

— Deb Caletti

169. “I confess I had a Child of Divorce Reunion Fantasy Number One Thousand, where I for a moment imagined my father finding out that Dino really was a killer woman and that my parents would have to get back together. I saw them running through a meadow, hand in hand. Okay, maybe not a meadow. But I saw me having only one Christmas and one phone number and only my father’s shaved bristles in the bathroom sink.”

— Deb Caletti

170. “I guess after all those years he had exhausted me. I never knew I was signing up for a battle, but I finally knew that he had won.”

— Deb Caletti

171. “She’d be one of those parents who left a kid behind at a rest stop, driving for miles before she noticed. We’d hear about her on the evening news.”

— Deb Caletti

172. “I always seemed to forget that needing your mother and getting what you needed from your mother were separate but neighboring planets.”

— Deb Caletti

173. “And if you could make a choice, then why not pick happiness?”

— Deb Caletti

174. “Here is what happens when your mother worries: You become secretly worried. Anxiety plays in your background like bad grocery store music. You pace and count stuff and wake at night, your heart beating too fast. You pretend to be brave, and do stuff to prove you’re not a scared person like she is.”

— Deb Caletti

175. “Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It’s the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.”

— Deb Caletti

176. “When the story gets sad and terrible, when there are too many mistakes to count, hang on for the beautiful parts.”

— Deb Caletti

177. “Dread begins to inch in. No. Dread isn’t one of those subtle emotions. It moves in and takes over, and then it drips and hands, like Spanish moss.”

— Deb Caletti

178. “She doesn’t bother to tell him that he should not be sorry, that he is not responsible for any of those things. She doesn’t bother because they are both chronic apologizers, and chronic apologizers know that sorry is also just sorrow for the general state of the world.”

— Deb Caletti

179. “Annabelle?” Ovivia says gently. “This is about you. But also... me. All of us. And... my little sisters. Every woman. Every person, but especially – every female person.”

— Deb Caletti

180. “I’m fine.” Oh, how we love and overuse fine, our all-purpose little evasion. Fine means not fine. Fine means Pity me. Fine means Don’t ask.”

— Deb Caletti

181. “A person shows signs of clutching on too fast, of being needy, of not hearing the word “no,” of jealousy, of guarding you and your freedom. But the signs can be so small they skitter right past you. Sometimes they dance past, looking satiny, something you should applaud. Someone’s jealousy can make you feel good. Special. But it’s not even about you. It’s about a hand that is already gripping. It’s about their need, circling around your throat.”

— Deb Caletti

182. “We’re as good at talking ourselves out of fear as into it, aren’t we? Maybe better.”

— Deb Caletti

183. “It’s shocking the things we call love.”

— Deb Caletti

184. “Fragile things become undone at a frightening speed.”

— Deb Caletti

185. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, you can pile on as many as you want, but the guilt is still there, like that pea under all those mattresses.”

— Deb Caletti

186. “When it comes to sisters, it seems one stays and one goes, one remains bound and the other is set free. She is who she is in good part because of who Gloria isn’t. In order to be herself, in order to be different from her sister, she had to take what was left over, the opposite, unchosen road. She is both glad and furious about it.”

— Deb Caletti

187. “Hurt is a weapon. Better weapon than most because it doesn’t look like one.”

— Deb Caletti

188. “Niceness is expected of her, not honesty.”

— Deb Caletti

189. “Why does anyone do anything impossible? To be bigger than the big bastard.”

— Deb Caletti

190. “The point is that you feel uncomfortable, and you’re trying to talk yourself out of it because you think you’re supposed to be nice.”

— Deb Caletti

191. “Running away can also be running to.”

— Deb Caletti

192. “What’s that about? Love must be more about power than we think, if even in its most intimate moment of expression we think about not being the one who risks the most.”

— Deb Caletti

193. “Just that, is one of those uncommon moments, those times when you don’t wish for something else, for even one thing to be different; when you have no other needs or worries, where your insides are calm, and everything you were ever restless about, anything that had ever given you angst, is quieted to stillness. No steel ball in your chest, no breathless fear. No blue numbness of nearly passing out, no nagging doubts of the backstage mind. All of that, forgotten. It is just rightness, so rare.”

— Deb Caletti

194. “The world was large, so large. Bigger than it had been before. Family, too, a bigger word. That felt like a good thing. An essential thing. There was power in numbers.”

— Deb Caletti

195. “She would bring you some great book because she was a book matchmaker, because she loved books the way other girls loved clothes.”

— Deb Caletti

196. “He’s going for wisdom but the real wisdom is knowing there sometimes isn’t any.”

— Deb Caletti

197. “The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn’t the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.”

— Deb Caletti

198. “Us frogs understand this.”

— Deb Caletti

199. “No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you’d think.”

— Deb Caletti

200. “I don’t know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net.”

— Deb Caletti