Top 200 Emily Giffin Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “And without Dex in my life, I like to think I could have somehow found contentment. But the truth is, I feel freer with Dex than I ever did when I was single. I feel more myself with him than without. Maybe true love does that.”

— Emily Giffin

102. “I find my voice and manage to say those three one-syllable words back to him. Words I haven’t uttered in a very, very long time. Words that meant nothing before now.”

— Emily Giffin

103. “After all, I think, isn’t it always about a boy?”

— Emily Giffin

104. “I wondered why I was so startled by the encounter when there was something that seemed utterly inevitable about the moment. Not in any grand, destined sense; just in the quiet, stubborn way that unfinished business has of imposing its will on the unwilling.”

— Emily Giffin

105. “Justice isn’t only about what a person deserves, but also about what a person needs.”

— Emily Giffin

106. “Things certainly aren’t the way you imagine them when you’re a kid and dreaming big dreams about what your life as a grown-up will look like.”

— Emily Giffin

107. “I like to match what I wear to my book jacket – it’s a little bit cheesy, but it’s my thing.”

— Emily Giffin

108. “Evident in every small act of kindness, it was love as a verb. Love that made me feel more complete than I had ever felt in my glamorous, Jimmy Choo filled past.”

— Emily Giffin

109. “Buried beneath disappointment and fear, anger and pride, I just might find it in my heart to forgive.”

— Emily Giffin

110. “Often I feel that projects overwhelm us when we look at how many hours are involved until completion. But just getting started is usually not that difficult.”

— Emily Giffin

111. “But I have learned that you can’t just create your own timetable and will it to come true.”

— Emily Giffin

112. “Every couple has two stories – the edited one to be shared from the couch and the unabridged version best left alone.”

— Emily Giffin

113. “Love and friendship. They are what make us who we are, and what can change us, if we let them.”

— Emily Giffin

114. “Everyone has issues. And at the end of the day... you are who you are.”

— Emily Giffin

115. “I really try to focus on my books and readers.”

— Emily Giffin

116. “A theme in a lot of my books – and in my own life – is making choices that you feel you should make, or what society wants you to make, as opposed to what is truly right for you.”

— Emily Giffin

117. “What I can’t stand are the judgmental hypocrites – people who talk a big Christian game yet don’t even make a cursory attempt to follow the Golden Rule, let alone some of those pesky commandments.”

— Emily Giffin

118. “For true downtime, I enjoy going for light runs, having drinks with friends and going to the movies with my husband.”

— Emily Giffin

119. “When I meet someone I like being with more than I like being alone, I’ll marry her.”

— Emily Giffin

120. “I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to explain to Zoe one of the very saddest notions in love and life: sometimes the timing is wrong – and sometimes you realize the heart of the matter way to late in the game.”

— Emily Giffin

121. “I flash a fake smile of my own, refraining from telling her what I’m really thinking: that it’s an unwise karmic move to go around feeling superior to other mothers. Because before she knows it, her little angel could become a tattooed teenager hiding joints in her designer handbag and doling out blow jobs in the backseat of her BMW.”

— Emily Giffin

122. “There are two kinds of women – those who eat in a crisis and those who lose their appetite in a crisis.”

— Emily Giffin

123. “I don’t know. She was a sweet girl. As sweet as they come. I don’t know why I didn’t love her. It’s something you can’t really control.”

— Emily Giffin

124. “It’s like Brad Pitt for us. You might not like blond men with pretty features, but c’mon, it’s Brad. You’re not going to kick him out of bed for eating crackers.”

— Emily Giffin

125. “I find myself wondering which is more egregious, to pretend to be happy when you’re not, or to feel so consistently dissatisfied when you should be happy.”

— Emily Giffin

126. “There are two kinds of sorry. There is the sorry imbued with regret. And a pure sorry. The kind that is merely asking for forgiveness, nothing more.”

— Emily Giffin

127. “Underscoring all of this is Leo – his constant presence in my mind, along with the troubling realization that I deeply associate him with the city and vice versa. So much so, in fact, that leaving New York feels an awful lot like leaving him.”

— Emily Giffin

128. “It’s simply human nature to have an occasional, fleeting interest in someone whom you once loved.”

— Emily Giffin

129. “Instead of relief or gratitude, more guilt washes over me. Andy’s certainly not faultless – no one ever is in a marriage.”

— Emily Giffin

130. “T know what they say about secrets. I’ve heard it all. That they can haunt and govern you. That they can poison relationships and divide families. That in the end, only the truth will set you free.”

— Emily Giffin

131. “Sweetened ice tea is one of the things I love about the South, right up there with homemade biscuits and cheese grits.”

— Emily Giffin

132. “I nod, thinking of how difficult marriage can be, how much effort is required to sustain a feeling between two people – a feeling that you can’t imagine will ever fade in the beginning when everything comes so easily. I think of how each person in a marriage owes it to the other to find individual happiness, even in a shared life. That is the only real way to grow together, instead of apart.”

— Emily Giffin

133. “I do not expect to get what I want, so I don’t. And I don’t even try.”

— Emily Giffin

134. “Then he asks if he can kiss me. It is a question I don’t usually like. Just do it, I always think.”

— Emily Giffin

135. “Inevitably I draw on my own relationships when I write, so if I’m writing about a fight between a husband and his wife, of course I’m going to think about a recent fight with my husband. Or if I’m writing about sisters, of course I’m going to think about my sister.”

— Emily Giffin

136. “You know in your heart when you’re doing the right thing and when you’re not. And you just have to do everything you can to stay the course.”

— Emily Giffin

137. “But I also knew in my heart that I wouldn’t cover for my son if he committed a terrible crime. Any crime. I wouldn’t lie for him. I wouldn’t obstruct justice for him. I would stand by him, but I would also want him to confess and truly repent and bear responsibility for his actions. I would want him to earn and deserve his forgiveness.”

— Emily Giffin

138. “I have always been drawn to coming-of-age stories and books and movies featuring compelling young characters.”

— Emily Giffin

139. “She wonders what fool ever said that it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all – she has never disagreed with something so much.”

— Emily Giffin

140. “Whether you CAN forgive and whether you SHOULD trust.”

— Emily Giffin

141. “I think of how life takes unexpected twists and turns, sometimes through sheer happenstance – like running into Leo on the street. Sometimes through calculated decisions – like Margot’s. Or mine, tonight, when I left Leo. In the end, it can all be called fate, but to me, it is more a matter of faith.”

— Emily Giffin

142. “I love him wholly and unconditionally and without reservation.”

— Emily Giffin

143. “It’s always a good feeling when you can produce just the right one-liner to prove your point so tidily.”

— Emily Giffin

144. “I don’t really know why I went to law school.”

— Emily Giffin

145. “Which always raises the interesting question of whether redheads pursue other redheads in a narcissistic way, or simply, because they have no other choice, as nonredheads aren’t interested.”

— Emily Giffin

146. “Did she ever regret her choices? Were her decisions more clear-cut than mine – or are there always shades of gray whe it comes to matters of the heart?”

— Emily Giffin

147. “The world is not that black and white, Rachel. There are no moral absolutes. It is complex.”

— Emily Giffin

148. “Time heals all wounds, particularly if you pack a bunch of stuff into that time.”

— Emily Giffin

149. “She was generally a happy person but had a tendency to live in the past, making frequent references to “when you kids were little.”

— Emily Giffin

150. “That is one of the problems with getting older. There is a distinct lag time between how you see others and how you view yourself. I still thought of myself as looking twenty-four.”

— Emily Giffin