Top 40 Gloria Naylor Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.”

— Gloria Naylor

2. “Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.”

— Gloria Naylor

3. “The last time you’re doing something – knowing you’re doing it for the last – makes it even more alive than the first.”

— Gloria Naylor

4. “Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.”

— Gloria Naylor

5. “Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.”

— Gloria Naylor

6. “Life is accepting what is and working from that.”

— Gloria Naylor

7. “A loud voice is not always angry; a soft voice not always to be dismissed; and a well-placed silence can be the indisputable last word.”

— Gloria Naylor

8. “Spoiled. That’s all it’s about – can’t live without this, can’t live without that. You can live without anything you weren’t born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.”

— Gloria Naylor

9. “The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul.”

— Gloria Naylor

10. “Life’s too short to spend time trying to explain the obvious to an idiot.”

— Gloria Naylor

11. “I don’t believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.”

— Gloria Naylor

12. “Then she turned and firmly folded her evening like gold and lavender gauze deep within the creases of her dreams, and let her clothes drop to the floor.”

— Gloria Naylor

13. “One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.”

— Gloria Naylor

14. “I don’t want to write without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.”

— Gloria Naylor

15. “Contempt mates well with pity.”

— Gloria Naylor

16. “You can’t teach talent. You can’t put in what God left out – but you can teach confidence.”

— Gloria Naylor

17. “Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power.”

— Gloria Naylor

18. “There’s something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there’s much more space than there really is-to live, to work.”

— Gloria Naylor

19. “Home. It’s being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger.”

— Gloria Naylor

20. “When you raise a god instead of a child, you’re bound to be serving him for the rest of your days. Same thing holds when you marry a god.”

— Gloria Naylor

21. “The right woman is the one you can live with, not the one in your head.”

— Gloria Naylor

22. “You don’t repay kindness with needless cruelty.”

— Gloria Naylor

23. “Just like that chicken coop, everything got four sides: his side, her side, an outside, and an inside. All of it is the truth.”

— Gloria Naylor

24. “Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me.”

— Gloria Naylor

25. “A myth is more powerful – and more lasting – than reality.”

— Gloria Naylor

26. “God had given her what she prayed for – a little boy who would always need her.”

— Gloria Naylor

27. “The unpainted walls of the long rectangular room were soaked with the smell of greasy chicken and warm, headless beer. The brown and pink faces floated above the trails of used cigarette smoke like bodiless carnival balloons.”

— Gloria Naylor

28. “You can lose a lot when you travel too much.”

— Gloria Naylor

29. “Self-consciousness is really a form of egotism.”

— Gloria Naylor

30. “She sincerely liked Mattie because unlike the others, Mattie never found the time to do jury duty on other people’s lives.”

— Gloria Naylor

31. “The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all; to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.”

— Gloria Naylor

32. “There are no absolute truths, and the best historians know that. You strive to capture a moment of time, and if your work is done properly, history becomes a written photograph.”

— Gloria Naylor

33. “That’s one of the privileges of old age – you can give plenty of advice ’cause most folks think that’s all you got left anyway.”

— Gloria Naylor

34. “We all don’t have to see eye to eye in order to see our way to the Kingdom. It’s the heart condition of each man that the Lord will judge.”

— Gloria Naylor

35. “Why do I write? The truth, the unvarnished truth, is that I haven’t a clue.”

— Gloria Naylor

36. “New customers are a pain in the butt until they get into the rhythm of things. Fried chicken Mondays. Hamburger Tuesdays. Hash Wednesdays. Pork chop Thursdays. Fish on Fridays. And a weekend open house: breakfast, lunch, dinner: your call.”

— Gloria Naylor

37. “The beginnings are gone, Laurel. But we can start with today and what you got around you.”

— Gloria Naylor

38. “We get so caught up in what a man isn’t. It’s what he is that counts.”

— Gloria Naylor

39. “Bloody noses had made them friends, but giving sound to the bruised places in their hearts made them brothers.”

— Gloria Naylor

40. “Now that she had actually seen and accepted reality, and reality brought such a healing calm.”

— Gloria Naylor

41. “The high stone fireplace, the heavy walnut tables, the fringed Oriental rug, the leather furniture. The air definitely came alive, but Willie felt out of place. Not because of any excessive luxury-the furnishings, while meticulously preserved, were still scarred and worn, but they seemed to suspend him in another time. Why, it was like walking into a movie set for Wuthering Heights.”

— Gloria Naylor

42. “Ain’t nothing to be shamed of. Having a baby is the most natural thing there is. The Good Book call children a gift from the Lord. And there ain’t no place in that Bible of His that say babies is sinful. The sin is the fornicatin’, and that’s over and done with. God done forgave you of that a long time ago, and what’s going on in your belly now ain’t nothin’ to hang your head about – you remember that.”

— Gloria Naylor

43. “She breathed deeply of the freedom she found in Mattie’s presence. Here she had no choice but to be herself. The carefully erected decoys she was constantly shuffling and changing to fit the situation were of no use here. Etta and Mattie went way back, a singular term that claimed co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all of the unimportant ones. And by rights of this possession, it tolerated no secrets.”

— Gloria Naylor

44. “True insanity, as frightening as it might be, gives a sort of obliviousness to the chaos in a life. People who commit suicide are struggling to order their existence, and when they see it’s a losing battle, they will finalize it rather than have it wrenched from them. Insanity wouldn’t permit that type of clarity.”

— Gloria Naylor

45. “Etta and Mattie went way back, a singular term that claimed co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all of the unimportant ones.”

— Gloria Naylor

46. “They looked only at the products and thought they saw God – they should have looked at the process.”

— Gloria Naylor

47. “Basil stopped crying instantly in order to enjoy Ciel’s punishment.”

— Gloria Naylor