Top 250 E. Lockhart Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Be sad, be sorry-but don’t shoulder it.”

— E. Lockhart

52. “Three flowers for you. You should have three.” He looks pitiful. He looks powerful. I love him, but I am not sure I like him. I take his hand and lead him inside.”

— E. Lockhart

53. “He was a person who couldn’t fake a smile but smiled often.”

— E. Lockhart

54. “One day I looked at Gat, lying in the Clairmont hammock with a book, and he seemed, well, like he was mine. Like he was my particular person.”

— E. Lockhart

55. “Be decisive; no one likes a waffler”; “Never complain, never explain” –.”

— E. Lockhart

56. “Don’t cause distress, she said. Don’t remind people of a loss. “Do you understand, Cady? Silence is a protective coating over pain.”

— E. Lockhart

57. “I lie there and wait, and remind myself over and over that it doesn’t last forever. That there will be another day and after that, yet another day. One of those days, I’ll get up and eat breakfast and feel okay.”

— E. Lockhart

58. “I spun violently into the sky, raging and banging stars from their moorings, swirling and vomiting.”

— E. Lockhart

59. “For Gat with everything, everything. Cady.”

— E. Lockhart

60. “I sit around too much, waiting for other people to do stuff and angsting about stuff they’ve done, without doing anything myself.”

— E. Lockhart

61. “MY FULL NAME is Cadence Sinclair Eastman. I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools. I like a twist of meaning. I endure.”

— E. Lockhart

62. “I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools.”

— E. Lockhart

63. “The universe is seeming really huge right now,” he told me. “I need something to hold on to.” “I’m here.”

— E. Lockhart

64. “For the old people in my family – Mummy, the aunties, Granddad – the accumulation of beautiful objects is a life goal. Whoever dies with the most stuff wins. Wins what? is what I’d like to know. I used to be a person who liked pretty things. Like Mummy does, like all the Sinclairs do. But that’s not me anymore.”

— E. Lockhart

65. “My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss, then, for an hour or two. My grandmother, my grandmother. Gone forever, though I could smell her Chanel perfume on the fabrics.”

— E. Lockhart

66. “A giant wields a rusty saw. He gloats and hums as he works, slicing through my forehead and into the mind behind it.”

— E. Lockhart

67. “He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. All that was there, in the lids of his brown eyes, his smooth skin, his lower lip pushed out. There was coiled energy inside.”

— E. Lockhart

68. “But the thing that makes me really messed up is the contradiction: when I’m not hating myself, I feel righteous and victmized. Like the world is so unfair.”

— E. Lockhart

69. “I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools. I like a twist of meaning. I endure.”

— E. Lockhart

70. “Just think before you complain about stuff other people would love to have.”

— E. Lockhart

71. “She made me act normal. Because I was. Because I could. She told me to breathe and sit up. And I did what she asked. Again.”

— E. Lockhart

72. “Secrets are more powerful when people know you’ve got them.”

— E. Lockhart

73. “Who killed the girls? The dragon? Or their father?”

— E. Lockhart

74. “Everything doesn’t seem like anything when you love someone. Especially when you’re young.”

— E. Lockhart

75. “He had that hungry mind, constantly turning things over, looking not for answers but for understanding.”

— E. Lockhart

76. “The universe was good because he was in it.”

— E. Lockhart

77. “I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane. Even if the dogs are small.”

— E. Lockhart

78. “It makes it hard to be alive, some days. A lot of times I wish I were dead, I truly do, just to make the pain stop.”

— E. Lockhart

79. “8. Fact: It is a bad idea to date a known cheater, because even if he doesn’t cheat on you, you will always know he’s capable of it and will never fully trust him. Then you will become even more insecure and neurotic than you already are.”

— E. Lockhart

80. “Every time Gat said these things, so casual and truthful, so oblivious – my veins opened. My wrists split. I bled down my palms. I went light-headed. I’d stagger from the table or collapse in quiet shameful agony, hoping no one in the family would notice. Especially not Mummy.”

— E. Lockhart

81. “Love is when you have a really amazing piece of cake, and it’s the very last piece, but you let him have it.”

— E. Lockhart

82. “Like, in Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp is one big ambition machine. She’ll stop at zero. Jane Eyre has temper tantrums, throws herself on the floor. Pip in Great Expectations is deluded and money hungry. All of them want a better life and go after it, and all of them are morally compromised. That makes them interesting.”

— E. Lockhart

83. “You remind us that we’re selfish bastards. You’re not one of us, that way.”

— E. Lockhart

84. “My feelings leak out my eyes, crumpling my face, heave through my frame.”

— E. Lockhart

85. “He looked at you like you were the brightest planet in the galaxy.”

— E. Lockhart

86. “It tasted like salt and failure.”

— E. Lockhart

87. “He is bounce, effort and snark.”

— E. Lockhart

88. “If only she could go back in time, Jule felt, she would be a better person. Or a different person. She would be more herself. Or maybe less herself.”

— E. Lockhart

89. “I looked at her. my lovely, tall mother with her pretty coil of hair and her hard, bitter mouth. Her veins were never open. Her heart never leapt out to flop helplessly on the lawn. She never melted into puddles. She was normal. Always. At any cost.”

— E. Lockhart

90. “I can’t even say sorry,” she tells me. “There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.”

— E. Lockhart

91. “It is not glamorous that I can’t drive a car. It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers. However, I am not immune to the feeling of being viewed as a mystery, as a Sinclair, as part of a privileged clan of special people, and as part of a magical, important narrative, just because I am part of this clan. My mother is not immune to it, either. This is who we have been brought up to be. Sinclairs. Sinclairs.”

— E. Lockhart

92. “It is good to be loved, even though it will not last.”

— E. Lockhart

93. “Go on, strike, said the witch, smiling. Fire is beautiful. Nothing bad will happen.”

— E. Lockhart

94. “Be a little kinder than you have to, Cady, and things will be all right.”

— E. Lockhart

95. “For anyone who has been taught that good equals small and silent, here is my heart with all its ugly tangles and splendid fury.”

— E. Lockhart

96. “I don’t want to forget I’m trying to remember.”

— E. Lockhart

97. “Antiques and Oriental rugs tell people that my mother may be a dog breeder who dropped out of Bryn Mawr, but she’s got power – because she’s got money.”

— E. Lockhart

98. “It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch.”

— E. Lockhart

99. “I had lost my dad. I had come here to this island from a house of tears and falsehood and I saw Gat, and I saw that rose in his hand, and in that one moment, with the sunlight from the window shining in on him, the apples on the kitchen counter, the smell of wood and ocean in the air, I did call it love.”

— E. Lockhart

100. “I do not suffer fools.”

— E. Lockhart