Top 40 Emma Forrest Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Write a page every single day, even if what you put on the page that day is no good – it’s the only way to get better.”

— Emma Forrest

2. “If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.”

— Emma Forrest

3. “I like the cuts – they comfort me – I can’t lie.”

— Emma Forrest

4. “Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn’t, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.”

— Emma Forrest

5. “I’m in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he’s seen the darkness too, but somehow we’ve become each other’s light.”

— Emma Forrest

6. “Let me tell you something: when you dance, you are the greatest dancer who has ever lived. And when you sing, you will have the courage to raise your voice to the heavens, knowing that you may never get an answer.”

— Emma Forrest

7. “But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.”

— Emma Forrest

8. “When I was younger I loved Betty Blue, and at the moment I’m completely besotted with Angelina Jolie. But sometimes I’m unnerved by the idea of men liking her. Because I think that there is a side to every man that really wants to watch a woman fall apart.”

— Emma Forrest

9. “I’m not crazy or dangerous, just a bit eccentric and lonely.”

— Emma Forrest

10. “Of course he freaked me out. Of course it’s nothing to do with me. But none of that matters. He loved me and now he doesn’t. I was everything to him and now I am nothing.”

— Emma Forrest

11. “I would say at the moment the only person who could have played me this past year would have to be Angelina Jolie.”

— Emma Forrest

12. “People don’t know. We don’t know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who’ve left us is because we knew them so well.”

— Emma Forrest

13. “Everyone asks about how I’ll feel about the tattoos and scars in thirty years. I always say: “I’ll like them.” I’ve always loved damaged monuments, in architecture and in humans.”

— Emma Forrest

14. “Yes, I have patterns of love addiction. But I’m a woman. Of course I do.”

— Emma Forrest

15. “He was a super shiny boy and I liked the shape of him. Under the blanket. In the shower. I liked his shadow on the street and his imprint on the sofa. I hated the smell of hair gel on his head, but I loved it on the pillow. I love the smell of losing someone.”

— Emma Forrest

16. “Jeff Bridges says that the reason he’s one of the few stars in Hollywood whose made his marriage last for decades is that every time they think there’s no more doors left to walk through in the room, they just keep looking and keep looking until they find one.”

— Emma Forrest

17. “It’s all in her walk, a cartoon swagger. Part Jayne Mansfield, part Muhammad Ali. Men never know if it’s an invitation upstairs or an invitation outside.”

— Emma Forrest

18. “I finally accept that not only do I not understand the death of my relationship, but I do not need to. These men were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom. The revelation is not that I lost them, but that I had them.”

— Emma Forrest

19. “I think about pasta in the shape of Hello Kitty, stockings with diamond seams up the back, Marilyn’s crumbling cake-mascara, and Liz Taylor’s new white hair. I haven’t got time for the trivials.”

— Emma Forrest

20. “I still believe that you truly find yourself not in travel, but in other human souls.”

— Emma Forrest

21. “When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.”

— Emma Forrest

22. “I thought of him, with his feet in the Chateau Marmont pool and his fork in a carrot cake. He was just a little kid. I was upset at what I had introduced him to, the records and films he didn’t already know. I felt like a mother who had left syringes around the room and let her baby get hooked on hard drugs.”

— Emma Forrest

23. “I don’t want to go to university. I don’t like unity and I hate verses. I just love the choruses of songs.”

— Emma Forrest

24. “Now that he’s gone, I feel like I’m a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone. And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him. The shame is overwhelming.”

— Emma Forrest

25. “It took a long time, but my heart now feels full when I think of him. When you fall in love again – which I have – it’s funny the other things that come back in with that open-ness. You have this ghost chorus of the lovers who came before, but they’re benign now, they’re good spirits.”

— Emma Forrest

26. “My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don’t mean.”

— Emma Forrest

27. “I wish I had been less keen to inject my own opinions, but I was a teenager and your teenage self is generally an idiot compared to the adult you. That’s the way it should be. If it’s the other way around, you have a problem.”

— Emma Forrest

28. “Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.”

— Emma Forrest

29. “I think that’s such a beautiful sentiment. Love should only last as long as a very expensive and impractical bikini that looks stunning, but dissolves in the sea within days. So many pop songs tell of this terrible, tiresome love that they want to last forever. But that just makes me think of long-life milk, acrid and fake. Love should be like a movie trailer. Even if the film’s a stinker, you get the best laughs and the biggest explosions in the space of two minutes.”

— Emma Forrest

30. “Hotel rooms are funny things. They make everything look different. If people have to sleep with each other, sexually or platonically, they should do it in kitchens. The kitchen is the epicenter of truth in any home or building. You could never misconstrue a look or a word or a touch in the icy cool, compartmentalized presence of a fridge.”

— Emma Forrest

31. “I want you to stay. I never want there to be a time when we don’t share space.”

— Emma Forrest

32. “My thoughts are messy, my emotions are messy, my body goes in and out at will. The raised white scars on my arms and legs are the only aspect of my being that comes close to minimalism. They came from chaos, but it is hard to carve frustration and unease into the flesh. Only straight lines.”

— Emma Forrest

33. “I enjoy films where two characters are coming of age, just different ages. That’s why I love ‘Paper Moon’ so much.”

— Emma Forrest

34. “Since I’m a cat who doesn’t know what I am, I wear track pants with old-skool Nikes but Gina Lollobrigida skintight sweaters. I am caught between childhood and va-va-voom.”

— Emma Forrest

35. “We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.”

— Emma Forrest

36. “If you don’t know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.”

— Emma Forrest

37. “It’s as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don’t think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It’s just that I was me. It was all I had.”

— Emma Forrest

38. “I wouldn’t say that my emotions are extreme. I’d say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna’s dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I’m going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I’m happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating.”

— Emma Forrest

39. “No one ever loved you like him. And no one ever took it away so completely. But it’s here. Look around.”

— Emma Forrest

40. “When he kisses me, I cry. I explain it’s not because I wish he were someone else, it’s because it’s such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.”

— Emma Forrest

41. “Well. There is a psychiatric occurrence we see in men-not often women-where they put all their hopes and dreams onto one person, so intensely that at some point it trips a wire in the brain circuitry, and that causes them to go, in a minute, 180 degrees the other way.”

— Emma Forrest

42. “Cyndi Lauper was hilarious and generous, someone I’d loved from childhood who didn’t disappoint.”

— Emma Forrest

43. “And if you don’t know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity.”

— Emma Forrest

44. “You can have this kind of love. You can have it. You just grab it. Of course the problem with having that love is that you can lose it, too.”

— Emma Forrest

45. “There’s so much guilt there attached to having a perfectly good life.”

— Emma Forrest

46. “I don’t see what’s so good about being genuine. Clog dancing is genuine. Isn’t being fake more of an achievement? At least it takes some inspiration. Like, sherbet dips, they’re a special food. Think of all the additives and coloring and grinding that it takes to create a sherbet dip. But carrots? They’re just out there, shrieking, “Hi, we’re some carrots! Love us for it!” They never have to prove themselves.”

— Emma Forrest

47. “At least you know where you are with blood. At least other people can see it.”

— Emma Forrest