Top 35 Hazel Hayes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “But knowing something and believing are two very different things.”

— Hazel Hayes

2. “A breakup is like a death without a funeral.”

— Hazel Hayes

3. “Don’t be ridiculous,′ said Maya, ‘You can’t fail at a relationship. That’s like getting off of a roller coaster and saying you failed because the ride is over. Things end. That doesn’t mean the experience wasn’t worth it.”

— Hazel Hayes

4. “We are both wounded in our own way and, like a pair of tectonic plates shifting over time, our wounds will gradually grate against one another’s, causing damage at a glacial pace. Neither of us will notice until it’s too late.”

— Hazel Hayes

5. “The point is that for a time, I was better, but I wasn’t ‘better’. We really need a better word for better.”

— Hazel Hayes

6. “Crazy is the space between what they tell you and what you know is true.”

— Hazel Hayes

7. “I wondered how much of the feeling of love is chemicals and cravings and dependency, and how much of the act of love is habit.”

— Hazel Hayes

8. “I had never really thought about the horizon before. It was always just there. I stare out now through my rain-spattered windshield at that sharp, bluish line beyond which the whole world might simply fall away, and I imagine a life where buildings block my view in all directions, a life where the horizon isn’t just down the road. Sitting here now, that life feels almost inconceivable.”

— Hazel Hayes

9. “To this day I struggle to sleep when I’m expecting someone home; some part of me still won’t accept that people who leave will eventually come back.”

— Hazel Hayes

10. “That moment is what I love most about creating something new: the idea, the spark, the beginning, where what might have been was still what might be.”

— Hazel Hayes

11. “I pictured the couple we might someday become. And in my mind, in that moment at least, they lived happily ever after.”

— Hazel Hayes

12. “For better or for worse, I am my mother’s daughter, and her story is my story too. It’s mine to carry, mine to hold – with love if I can manage it – and mine to weave into my own.”

— Hazel Hayes

13. “I was supporting him when I needed support. And I was being made to feel responsible for all his problems. It was a microcosm of our entire relationship.”

— Hazel Hayes

14. “I loathe the assumption that I will ‘come to my senses’ someday or – worse still – that my status as non-mother means I’m somehow lacking in emotional range.”

— Hazel Hayes

15. “He was a lot like my father, my ex. They so often are. We choose these men, I’m told, because the pain they cause is familiar and therefore comfortable. How sad is that?”

— Hazel Hayes

16. “No matter how much I learned about death, I wanted to be able to blindly believe in something that might make me feel better, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it because I feel much the same about the Church as I do about dead bodies – that they can both provide consolation, but only if you’re willing to ignore some harsh truths. I find no more comfort from whispering in a dead person’s ear than I do from whispering to a made-up God in the dark. Though sometimes I envy the fools who can.”

— Hazel Hayes

17. “Rituals and routine became a safety blanket of sorts, something I could wrap around myself when things felt uncertain, which they so often did.”

— Hazel Hayes

18. “I’m not sure what I expected to happen when he left. Maybe years of reading fairy tales had convinced me that the nightmare would end once the monster was gone. But that’s not how it was.”

— Hazel Hayes

19. “You’re supposed to feel lonely when you’re alone. But I felt lonely when we were together.”

— Hazel Hayes

20. “Whatever your brain tells you – that you’re useless, that you’re broken, that you’re unfixable – just hear it, acknowledge it and try to let it pass. You are not broken just because your brain says so.”

— Hazel Hayes

21. “Of course, he could just tell me how he’s feeling, but that would require self-awareness and communication skills, neither of which Theo possesses. So I settle for speculation. Today he’s an enigma; he’s gone from ignoring me to crying on me to insulting me to complimenting me to ignoring me again and I don’t know what any of it means. My head hurts.”

— Hazel Hayes

22. “I sit on the balcony with the phone to my ear and as the sun makes its way slowly across the sky, I tell her everything. Not just about the pregnancy test; I tell her all the things we’re afraid to tell our mothers about our partners in case they tell us what we don’t want to hear that we already know: that we should leave them.”

— Hazel Hayes

23. “There is no more obvious indicator of the passage of time than children growing in your absence.”

— Hazel Hayes

24. “I used to think the only way a man could hurt you was by lashing out, but it turns out the absense of action can cause just as much pain.”

— Hazel Hayes

25. “I know that staying with him doesn’t mean I’m weak. I know it wasn’t my fault. I know all this. But knowing something and believing something are two very different things. And part of me still blames myself for staying.”

— Hazel Hayes

26. “Some of the writers we studied were dark and depressed... but at least it was their depression and not mine; I could close the book whenever I wanted and leave it there between the pages.”

— Hazel Hayes

27. “The things we think we’re hiding from people, we’re only really hiding from ourselves.”

— Hazel Hayes

28. “But he loved her in the same way he loves his mother, with naivety and a selective blindness.”

— Hazel Hayes

29. “He stood there, staring at me regretfully, and I couldn’t tell if he regretted the fight, the surprise visit, or ever having met me.”

— Hazel Hayes

30. “I had known he was capable of doing this. I was just too naive and too arrogant to believe he would do it to me. We all think we’ll be different, don’t we?”

— Hazel Hayes

31. “I watch Maya sipping her tea and I wonder how many women carry the memory of a child nobody knew but them. How many women grieve alone and in silence, without sympathy or ceremony, too afraid or ashamed to speak of their loss? And why should they feel ashamed, or afraid, or alone? Why are there so many others, when this is common, why isn’t it something we talk about? And when it happened to my friend, why didn’t I know what to do?”

— Hazel Hayes

32. “I wonder we’re all just the product of our parents’ fears and failings, and their parents before them. I wonder how far back the cycle goes, whether I’m predisposed to being mentally ill, whether I have any choice in how my life unfolds, or the person that I’m destined to be. You could go mad trying to figure it out.”

— Hazel Hayes

33. “A big thing happened,′ she goes on, ’and it doesn’t matter who’s right or who’s wrong, this has changed things. They may never be the same again.”

— Hazel Hayes

34. “I think I like stories because they’re simple and contained. You establish a status quo, create conflict, then resolve it. In life, nothing is ever really resolved. Your story never stops. How can it, when all our stories are woven together, part of some greater tapestry of tales that make up our lives and the lives of those around us?”

— Hazel Hayes

35. “Isaac was no different, I thought. They both held people back out of fear of being left behind and when that didn’t work they lashed out, desperate for any kind of attention. I wasn’t sure if either of them knew what they were doing or why, but I suddenly felt very sorry for them both.”

— Hazel Hayes

36. “We accept the love we’re used to.”

— Hazel Hayes