Top 40 Erika Swyler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nothing made you angry like missing someone.”

— Erika Swyler

2. “Silence is its own kind of tension.”

— Erika Swyler

3. “I was taught to watch for gentle souls, as they’ve not the wit to look after themselves.”

— Erika Swyler

4. “Why the hell don’t people understand there are some things you don’t talk about? You keep it to yourself so you hurt fewer people. You’re supposed to pay with guilt. Guilt is penance.”

— Erika Swyler

5. “Hard thoughts are held in small words.”

— Erika Swyler

6. “She’d started swimming early in the morning, when the kids were asleep, when she thought he was asleep. She didn’t know her absence woke him, that the shift in the bed was an earthquake. When she climbed back in, she smelled like salt and seaweed. Sometimes her hair would still be knotted on top of her head. She tried to keep it dry. She didn’t want him to know. The problem with marrying the mermaid girl from the carnival was knowing that one day she’d swim away.”

— Erika Swyler

7. “Before the call buzzed in, Nedda wound her fingers in the small knot of hair at the back of Evgeni’s head. Light, scratchy – a warm steel-wool pad, but soft. She gave it a gentle tug. “See? I like you fine.” When Mission Control appeared on-screen, Evgeni was laughing. They said nothing about blindness. Nothing about energy spikes or which government made the swap from plutonium to strontium. The space between Earth and Chawla filled with all the things that could not be said.”

— Erika Swyler

8. “Headaches were like birds. Starlings. They could be perfectly calm, then a single acorn could drop and send the entire flock to the sky.”

— Erika Swyler

9. “We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive. I’ve been lifting anchors since I was eighteen. I’ve been holding my breath since before I was born.”

— Erika Swyler

10. “What makes a curse isn’t the words themselves, but the will bound to them, intention married to ink and tragedy.”

— Erika Swyler

11. “Having all the time in the world makes getting things done impossible.”

— Erika Swyler

12. “He’s broken, but not broken enough.”

— Erika Swyler

13. “Nobody loves you quite like someone who’s sorry.”

— Erika Swyler

14. “She just got sad, okay? Unbearably sad.”

— Erika Swyler

15. “It’s sort of like a hobby, but kind of like addiction?” he says, voice tipping up as he cocks his head. “You think you’re gonna get just one, but then one starts looking really good with another and before you know it you want every piece of you drawn on. I wish I had more space. Some people don’t like their skin, you know?” He pops a piece of broccoli into his mouth, using his fingers. “I picked mine.”

— Erika Swyler

16. “His words are heavy with rare things: care and possibility.”

— Erika Swyler

17. “Perhaps the book opened a door; books have a way of causing ripples.”

— Erika Swyler

18. “The book is open, spine cracked, abused in a way no one with respect for paper should ever do.”

— Erika Swyler

19. “Half the charm in old books is the marks of living they acquire;.”

— Erika Swyler

20. “We were all bidding on pure speculation.”

— Erika Swyler

21. “People spend their entire lives moving back and forth over the same water, moving but staying.”

— Erika Swyler

22. “Sometimes you made love to a man because you wanted your body to feel something other than the aches and pains of use. Sometimes you made love to man because he looked so good that you wanted to try him on. Sometimes you made love to a man because he fathered your children, he made you a home, he loved you, and he staunched the parts of you that were always bleeding. Sometimes you made love to a man because you felt split in two, and joining with him pulled you back together.”

— Erika Swyler

23. “We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive.”

— Erika Swyler

24. “To think of the time I spend procuring books... How fitting: a book procured me. Utterly fantastic...”

— Erika Swyler

25. “A librarian remembers the particular scent of glue and dust, and if we’re so lucky – and I was – the smell of parchment, a quiet tanginess, softer than wood pulp or cotton rag. We would bury ourselves in books until flesh and paper became one and ink and blood at last ran together.”

— Erika Swyler

26. “Even in a sea of names, a drowning mermaid has a way of standing out.”

— Erika Swyler

27. “Because there are things you do for people you’ve known your whole life. You let them save you, you put them in your books, and you let each other begin again, clean.”

— Erika Swyler

28. “They made an oddly joined puzzle, but the pieces fit in the right craggy places.”

— Erika Swyler

29. “Once you’ve held a book and really loved it, you forever remember the feel of it, its specific weight, the way it sits in your hand.”

— Erika Swyler

30. “She’d seen her father as a little boy, as an old man, and all the people in between, but none of those fathers were him. When sine crossed X, she knew him like she knew home, the cracks in the front porch steps she walked over every day, the creaky spot in the kitchen floor, how the living room smelled like all of them together. She knew him the way you know the smell of chocolate chip cookies in the oven, or the nap of a favorite blanket snuggled.”

— Erika Swyler

31. “I think sometimes it is difficult to look after ourselves,′ he said, thoughtfully. ‘We look to friends to do it for us.”

— Erika Swyler

32. “How good it was that people, like houses, had frames and that those frames could be so beautiful.”

— Erika Swyler

33. “Churchwarry knows it matters little how much of it he believes, only that Simon believed. And he’d like to as well. For all the wideness of the water, the town he is in feels closed, isolated. Perhaps the book opened a door; books have a way of causing ripples. He watches a card dip and vanish under a whitecap and sees in the water’s spray a hope so bright it blisters.”

— Erika Swyler

34. “I’d not taken you for a fool. Silent yes, but a fool, no.”

— Erika Swyler

35. “If it’s possible to have a reading hangover, I have one.”

— Erika Swyler

36. “You killed him too. It just took longer.”

— Erika Swyler

37. “She’d wanted that, a grandfather. Someone who would stay. Michel had an eyetooth that turned sideways and she loved it more than anything else in the world. But someone wasn’t yours because you loved a tooth.”

— Erika Swyler

38. “Amos did not listen; he was desperately tired of listening; he wished to speak.”

— Erika Swyler

39. “It’s brutal to realize that someone might find a life with you in it unbearable.”

— Erika Swyler

40. “He sleeps as if making up for years of being awake.”

— Erika Swyler

41. “I need to get into the water, to clear my head.”

— Erika Swyler

42. “With life blooming inside her, the water answered her questions with a whispered yes, and part of her knew home. In a tidal river on the Virginia coast she encountered a peculiar creature that scuttled the riverbed. She held it up and examined the graceful curve of its shell, its neat spike of a tail, and spidery feet that kicked and scratched at the air as she cradled it in her palm. A wonder just for her, she thought. The flickering of a child inside her laughed. Evangeline.”

— Erika Swyler

43. “She’d been taught that fear was worry that something bad would happen to you. It wasn’t. Fear was something horrible happening to someone you love, someone you need, and you being left alone.”

— Erika Swyler

44. “Inventions were not like your children. Your children were all your flaws shown to you in a way that made you love them: your worst made good. Inventions were your best attempt at beautiful thought. They were objective; they worked or they did not. They had purpose, whether they achieved it or not. They were yours always, in that they did not leave you, or turn away.”

— Erika Swyler

45. “He hoped, foolishly perhaps, but he’d always loved the Fool. Amos.”

— Erika Swyler

46. “To Nedda, psychology and gynecology were similar in that a doctor saw more of your most intimate parts than you did.”

— Erika Swyler

47. “The dirty secret about history is how much of it is conjecture.”

— Erika Swyler