Top 40 Gillian McAllister Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Keep on keeping on.”

— Gillian McAllister

2. “Apricity. That’s what it’s called. A word Reuben taught me: the warmth of the sun in winter.”

— Gillian McAllister

3. “My lens is wide-angle. Hers is narrow, but clearer. I like the hyper-logic of it.”

— Gillian McAllister

4. “It’s so easy for false thoughts to pass through the net of your mind, not being caught, and to become truths.”

— Gillian McAllister

5. “My entire life I’d been so bloody frightened of what everybody thought of me and my failed existence and yet, when I failed spectacularly – sank so much lower, so much worse than failing a degree – I realized the truth of it: nobody cares what you think as much as you do. Not even close.”

— Gillian McAllister

6. “How sinister it is to relive your life backward. To see things you hadn’t at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing out around you. To uncover lies told by your husband. Jen would always have said Kelly was as straight as they come. But don’t all good liars seem that way?”

— Gillian McAllister

7. “Every house needs a cat,’ he said. ‘Every single one. Anyone who disagrees is wrong.”

— Gillian McAllister

8. “Banter can hide the worst sins. Some people laugh to hide their shame, they laugh instead of saying I feel embarrassed and small.”

— Gillian McAllister

9. “Deep breaths in and out. Feelings weren’t feelings. They were tangled mixtures of hormones: cortisol, adrenaline, rushing through her system, telling her lies. She knew this, and still they felt real.”

— Gillian McAllister

10. “Maybe it really is simply about books, and the things they can do for people.”

— Gillian McAllister

11. “He made me somehow see that life didn’t have to be experienced in a big way, and that happiness was small, really.”

— Gillian McAllister

12. “We only think of the bad things that happen, rather than those that, through fortune, pass us by.”

— Gillian McAllister

13. “What we were we are; we always will be.”

— Gillian McAllister

14. “Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases.”

— Gillian McAllister

15. “They, mother and son, are a zipper, slowly separating as the years rush by.”

— Gillian McAllister

16. “The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.”

— Gillian McAllister

17. “Life’s too long for this worry,” he adds. It’s a phrase of theirs, spanning back decades.”

— Gillian McAllister

18. “It’s complicated,’ Jack had said. ‘She was your mum and you loved her and she died. And she’d been unfaithful and she wasn’t always nice to you.’ He’d held his hands out like weighing scales. I could see it, then, for the first time. Both sides could be correct. The truth was complicated. I could love her and miss her and not miss her, all at the same time.”

— Gillian McAllister

19. “Quit, if you want to,” she says. “Life’s too short to staple dead Dalmatians to chairs forever.”

— Gillian McAllister

20. “Don’t worry. It’s – it’s nothing, probably,” she adds, wondering why she has always felt the need to do that. To be easygoing, not to worry people, to be good.”

— Gillian McAllister

21. “Whatever it is you’ve done, Jen thinks, I’ll never not love you.”

— Gillian McAllister

22. “And, when you don’t trust yourself, you can’t trust anybody else, either.”

— Gillian McAllister

23. “There is nothing I won’t do to help you: there is nothing I can’t do. All parents are superheroes, for this very reason.”

— Gillian McAllister

24. “How sinister it is to relive your life backward. To see things you hadn’t at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing out around you.”

— Gillian McAllister

25. “Maybe if she stops trying to learn from it, something will happen.”

— Gillian McAllister

26. “And, just like that, a friendship was born, out of tragedy and humour, as they often are.”

— Gillian McAllister

27. “Walk around them like they’re statues. Love them, just love them, and never go forward into the darkness and lies that await them, remaining here in blissful ignorance.”

— Gillian McAllister

28. “What’re we having?” she adds. Her father shrugs, a happy shrug. “Whatever,” he says. “Another person just sort of makes life feel official, doesn’t it? Even if we just have beans on toast.” Jen knows exactly what he means.”

— Gillian McAllister

29. “Parenthood is beautiful, but hard, too. It’s tough to exist in the world when there is someone going about their business who you would die for.”

— Gillian McAllister

30. “But isn’t humor a different kind of repression?”

— Gillian McAllister

31. “The complicated cocktail of parenthood. Loving and liking not always aligning.”

— Gillian McAllister

32. “Trump is actually just insane – as opposed to merely Republican.”

— Gillian McAllister

33. “How segmented life is. It splits so easily into friendships and addresses and life phases that feel endless but never, never last. Wearing suits.”

— Gillian McAllister

34. “Funny how those things felt so important then. Go and see the Christmas lights, bake and assemble the gingerbread house. And – poof. They disappear into history, causing only stress and leaving no imprint, like a footstep on sand that gets washed away too swiftly. Her entire life, she’s been so concerned with how things seem to be. Keeping up appearances. Having it all, the house with the carved pumpkin so everybody knew they’d done it. And yet. What was it all for?”

— Gillian McAllister

35. “The truth is, the good days with a baby are better than the greatest days in your pre-baby life.”

— Gillian McAllister

36. “Life’s too long for this worry,” he adds.”

— Gillian McAllister

37. “Life’s too long for work.” Life’s too long. That’s so clever.”

— Gillian McAllister

38. “Oh, the days when people read novels to pass the time.”

— Gillian McAllister

39. “Throughout her entire career she has always looked for the absence of things as well as their presence. Evidence is often in what people don’t say. What they take out.”

— Gillian McAllister

40. “ABC: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, Challenge everything. One of the most important rules of being a detective.”

— Gillian McAllister

41. “Like the hindsight paradox,” he continues, when he’s bought the doughnuts. “Everyone thinks they knew what was going to happen. They said, I knew it all along! but, actually, they would say that no matter what the outcome. Because our brains are so good at considering every possibility. We’ve known whenever anything was going to happen.”

— Gillian McAllister