Top 40 Elizabeth McCracken Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

2. “My father was right: you could make anybody amazing just by insisting they were.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

3. “It’s a happy life, but someone is missing. It’s a happy life, and someone is missing.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

4. “The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

5. “In front is a sign that says: An exact replica of a figment of my imagination, and that is what this life feels like some days. It’s a happy life, but someone is missing. It’s a happy life, and someone is missing. It’s a happy life-.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

6. “Enough fine weather and money and a few memorable meals make any place desirable.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

7. “You can’t out-travel sadness. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

8. “Unrequited love–plain desperate aboveboard boy-chasing–turned you into a salesperson, and what you were selling was something he didn’t want, couldn’t use, would never miss. Unrequited love was deciding to be useless, and I could never abide uselessness.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

9. “It’s a happy life and someone is missing.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

10. “I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on, but death goes on too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it,, but the death will never disappear from view.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

11. “In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

12. “I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on but that death goes on, too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it, but the death will never disappear from view. Your friends may say, Time heals all wounds. No, it doesn’t, but eventually you’ll feel better. You’ll be yourself again.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

13. “Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

14. “People think they’re interesting. That’s their first mistake.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

15. “This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It’s what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it’s better to say nothing than something clumsy.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

16. “History remembers the velvet hearted.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

17. “Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

18. “I believe marriage is a spectator sport.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

19. “Books are a bad family – there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can’t, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

20. “Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

21. “Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

22. “And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

23. “Maybe better that way, to not know our parents, to love them as we move away from them – they’re on the shore and we’re on a ship, moving away; later we will switch places as they sail away from us, and we say to them, a little longer.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

24. “It was tempting to believe that if you made yourself small and light, beneath notice, you might be allowed to persist nearly anywhere. But meek women were tossed out and forgotten: that was something she had learned from Bertha Truitt herself. What women needed to do was take up space. Become unbudgeable.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

25. “Librarian like Stewardess, Certified Public Accountant, Used Car Salesman is one of those occupations that people assume attract a certain deformed personality.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

26. “She believed in God for the same reason anybody does: it is unbearable to think that our private thoughts are truly private.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

27. “You cannot fly into your own arms.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

28. “They – the books I mean, not the ladies of Technical Services, though maybe those ladies too – might have dreamed of a different life in a private home, beloved and displayed and well dressed and only occasionally, dreamily read, but they belonged to the city now and had to work for the common good.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

29. “Don’t run away from your troubles, because they’ll sure as hell run faster.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

30. “We have, all of us, invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

31. “I had loved Portland. It was a clean city, with weather so delicate that at night you had to look at the streetlights to tell whether it was raining or snowing. Everything was heavier near Boston: air, accents, women.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

32. “Everybody on this earth was born,” he said. “It’s the one thing we all have in common.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

33. “Blame is a compulsive behavior, the emotional version of obsessive hand washing, until all you can do is hold your palms out till your hands are full of it, and rub, and rub, and accomplish nothing at all.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

34. “All librarians, deep down, loathe their buildings. Something is always wrong – the counter is too high, the shelves too narrow, the delivery entrance too far from the offices. The hallway echoes. The light from windows bleaches books. In short, libraries are constructed by architects, not librarians.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

35. “Books remember all the things you cannot contain.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

36. “She had a rear end as big as an open dictionary and a bad attitude.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

37. “For some people, history is simply what your wife looks good standing in front of. It’s what’s cast in bronze, or framed in sepia tones, or acted out with wax dummies and period furniture. It takes place in glass bubbles filled with water and chunks of plastic snow; it’s stamped on souvenir pencils and summarized in reprint newspapers. History nowadays is recorded in memorabilia. If you can’t purchase a shopping bag that alludes to something, people won’t believe it ever happened.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

38. “I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn’t believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn’t mention – as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

39. “Engagements – they are like a prayer before eating, best quick.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

40. “No generation is ever spontaneous. We are none of us our own kind.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

41. “I come from food the way some people come from money. Food was the medium I grew up in, what we talked about, what shaped our days.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

42. “There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don’t know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

43. “I got that familiar mania – there is information somewhere here, and I can find it, I have to. A good librarian is not so different from a prospector, her whole brain a divining rod. She walks to books and stands and wonders: here? Is the answer here? The same blind faith in finding, even when hopeless. If someone caught me when I was in the throes of tracking something elusive, I would have told them: but it’s out there. I can feel it.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

44. “I didn’t know what it was I was feeling. Then I realized it was seeing someone and knowing immediately that you love him.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

45. “People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

46. “I’ve always hated the notion, in life or in fiction, that the human personality is a puzzle to be solved, that we are a single flashback away from understanding why this person is cruel to her children, why that man has a dreamy, downcast look. A human being is not a lock and the past is not a key.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

47. “She loved being alive and in the world; being alive and in the world with her was like dancing with someone who really knew how to lead.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

48. “As for me, I don’t think writing is that hard, as long as you’re comfortable with failure on every single level.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

49. “Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice. Writers are suckers for pretty turns of phrase with only the ring of truth.”

— Elizabeth McCracken