Top 50 Emily M. Danforth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “How could I pretend to be a victim when I was so willing to sin?”

— Emily M. Danforth

2. “I just liked girls because I couldn’t help not to.”

— Emily M. Danforth

3. “Maybe I still haven’t become me. I don’t know how you tell for sure when you finally have.”

— Emily M. Danforth

4. “Now I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out differently if I’d not made that decision, but you don’t really get anywhere when you think too much about stuff like that.”

— Emily M. Danforth

5. “You can’t catch somebody doing something when they’re not hiding.”

— Emily M. Danforth

6. “But whatever we once were we weren’t anymore.”

— Emily M. Danforth

7. “I was doing my little stand up shtick, the one I did for pretty girls, so they’d like me quickly and wouldn’t try too hard to actually get to know me beyond my role as wisecracking Cameron, the orphan. Maybe it was a little like flirting, but also a kind of protection: Don’t get too close; I’m just jokes with substance.”

— Emily M. Danforth

8. “The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.”

— Emily M. Danforth

9. “A relationship with a higher power is often best practiced alone.”

— Emily M. Danforth

10. “That’s because we have it so good”, I told her, trying on his deep voice. We impersonated him all the way home, laughing and blowing bubbles, both of us knowing that he was right. We did have it so good.”

— Emily M. Danforth

11. “I felt all the ways in which this world seemed so, so enormous – the height of the trees, the hush and tick of the forest, the shift of the sunlight and shadows – but also so, so removed.”

— Emily M. Danforth

12. “You don’t know anything about God. You don’t even know anything about the movies.”

— Emily M. Danforth

13. “In the embrace’s release I caught the scent again. Unmistakable. Marijuana. These homos were high as kites.”

— Emily M. Danforth

14. “But I couldn’t ever make that dream happen. It just came on its own, the way dreams do.”

— Emily M. Danforth

15. “Now there was photographic evidence of me with a girl. Lindsey pack the camera in her duffel while I contemplated the film inside it, how it was pregnant with our secret, its birth inevitable.”

— Emily M. Danforth

16. “Maybe while you were alive I hadn’t even become me yet. Maybe I still haven’t become me. I don’t know how you tell for sure when you finally have.”

— Emily M. Danforth

17. “I also waited to feel like myself, as if it would land on me all at once, this feeling like I was me again because I was home. And it didn’t come.”

— Emily M. Danforth

18. “As we walked, Jane whistled songs I didn’t recognize. She was a good whistler and a fast walker, the squeak of her leg comforting, like the chug of a train or the whir of a fan, a piece of machinery doing its job. I liked following just behind her; she had such purpose to all of her moves.”

— Emily M. Danforth

19. “It felt really good to do something that made no sense at all.”

— Emily M. Danforth

20. “Longing is sort of a gross word. So is ache. Or yearn. They’re all kind of gross. But that’s how I had felt about touching, kissing, Coley.”

— Emily M. Danforth

21. “What was left of my high was mostly worn off, but there was enough there for me to appreciate being outdoors in spring in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

— Emily M. Danforth

22. “Just continue to jill off to her or whatever, but end it there. Seriously.”

— Emily M. Danforth

23. “I would write it all down. All of it. All the stuff that made me feel weird and mushy and stupid and scared when I went to say it, and sometimes even when I thought about it.”

— Emily M. Danforth

24. “I never disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul.”

— Emily M. Danforth

25. “I am a sad person who does sad things. And I am deadly, deadly tired of my unhappiness.”

— Emily M. Danforth

26. “But I thought that if I could be honest with Lydia, really honest, and answer all of her questions fully, then maybe I could somehow figure out some things about myself. What the hell? is basically what I was thinking. What the hell?”

— Emily M. Danforth

27. “That version, as with so many of the stories we tell about our history, erased a woman- a plain, bad heroine- in favor of a less messy and more palatable yarn about two feuding brothers from New England.”

— Emily M. Danforth

28. “I could see how you might let yourself get addicted to that kind of discipline, or denial; how it might seem like, if you kept doing it, over and over, that you were somehow living more cleanly or more righteously than other people. It was the same thing as following all those rules Lydia stuck to, and when that got old, making up even more rules to follow and then justifying them with some passage from the Bible.”

— Emily M. Danforth

29. “And so every day of my life I am playing a part;.”

— Emily M. Danforth

30. “She was a person like this: full of opinion and firm standing, she planted her flag in more topics than you could quite believe she could actually care about.”

— Emily M. Danforth

31. “That girl exists only as you choose to remember her. I’d recommend not remembering her at all.”

— Emily M. Danforth

32. “It’s weird that we’ve been able to understand anything the artist has said to us, what with her massive vocabulary.”

— Emily M. Danforth

33. “All the while I smelled Coley, and thought Coley, and wondered when I would start hating Coley Taylor, just how long it would take for that to happen, because I wasn’t anywhere near that place yet, but I thought that maybe I should be.”

— Emily M. Danforth

34. “I was much better at excepting everything than accepting anything, at least anything for certain, for definite. That much I knew. That much I believed.”

— Emily M. Danforth

35. “Lots of the leaves on the trees had already turned to shades of yellow, from canary to yield sign to lemon sherbet, and the fall sunlight was distilled through those leaves, the rays bouncing into the shadows around us in that chunk of forest.”

— Emily M. Danforth

36. “If you can’t accept this and remember them for who they were, and not who you’ve made them to be, then you won’t heal.”

— Emily M. Danforth

37. “Eleanor Faderman knew many books. But never before had she read a book that seemed to know her.”

— Emily M. Danforth

38. “Lindsey wasn’t sitting there with the two of them. And Lindsey wasn’t exiled to Promise for at least a year. So I kept the Lindsey part of me quiet.”

— Emily M. Danforth

39. “Too much had happened that night, too much had happened before that night, and so too much climbed into bed with them, sat heavily upon them, and kept them up and thinking, even if they did not say the things they were thinking to each other.”

— Emily M. Danforth

40. “I felt a wave of heat prickle across me, and then the nausea, all-consuming, as if I was taking it in with every breath, like my body was reacting since my head wasn’t doing it right.”

— Emily M. Danforth

41. “We were good at this game: We could make it go on for days.”

— Emily M. Danforth

42. “You only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life in you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.”

— Emily M. Danforth

43. “I didn’t even know that Jesus was into aerobics,” I said. “I’ve always imagined him as a speed walker, maybe across water.”

— Emily M. Danforth

44. “The possibilities of this life are magnificent,” Audrey says.-.”

— Emily M. Danforth

45. “Don’t find yourself regretting this. You’re much too young to haunt your own life.”

— Emily M. Danforth

46. “But I do, and we’re friends, and this is the sort of thing friends do for each other,′ she said with a kind of earnestness that maybe would have been laughable if I wasn’t so much in love with her.”

— Emily M. Danforth

47. “I didn’t tell Lydia about the dreams. I thought the first night would be the only night, and when it came back the next night, it seemed like I should have already told her about the night before, and then I decided that I could do this on my own; it was just a dream and I could handle it, and my feelings about it, without her.”

— Emily M. Danforth

48. “Death was certain, but it was not imminent.”

— Emily M. Danforth

49. “Alex saw very clearly how dangerous a book like Mary’s could become in the hands of such impressionable girls, such privileged girls: girls who kissed and fondled and laughed as they read each other passages out in the woods; girls whose parents’ social standing had taught them that there was nothing at all in the world they could not subjugate, purchase, or ignore; girls who set fires only to watch as others tried, and failed, to put them out.”

— Emily M. Danforth

50. “We lay flat on our backs, our feet planted and our knees in the air, the just-setting sun coloring the remaining clouds in plum and navy with Pepto Bismol-pink underbellies and the sky behind them every candy-colored shade of orange, from circus peanuts to sugared jelly slice.”

— Emily M. Danforth