Top 140 Helen Hoang Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Tough love is brutally honest and hurts you to help you. Tough love cuts you when you’re already bruised and berates you when you don’t heal faster.”

— Helen Hoang

2. “Money is better than men.”

— Helen Hoang

3. “She needed to get ready for bed, but first, she wanted to do nothing for a few moments. Just nothing. Nothing was such a luxury.”

— Helen Hoang

4. “When you love someone, you fight for them in every way you know how.”

— Helen Hoang

5. “I love you, Anna,” she whispers fiercely. “No matter what happens, I hope you know that. Fight with your sister if you must, but I stay in your life. Talk to me, tell me when things are wrong, and I’ll do my best. I can’t lose you.”

— Helen Hoang

6. “It’s not winning the race that’s important. It’s this moment right here, when I’m lying in the mud staring up at the dark sky with rain falling in my eyes. It’s facing the pain, facing failure, facing myself, and finding a way to make it to the end.”

— Helen Hoang

7. “I’d like you to watch what you’re doing and saying, and if it’s something that doesn’t feel right and true to who you are, if it’s something that exhausts you or makes you unhappy, take a look at why you are doing it. And if there isn’t a good reason... try not doing it.”

— Helen Hoang

8. “But big life events change people, and the truth is I’m different now.”

— Helen Hoang

9. “Self-pity is not an indulgence that I allow myself. This doesn’t feel like pity, though. It feels like self-compassion, and the realization makes me cry harder.”

— Helen Hoang

10. “For that’s the only place where true perfection exists – the blank page. Nothing I actually do can compete with the boundless potential of what I could do. But if I allow the fear of imperfection to trap me in perpetual beginnings, I’ll never create anything again.”

— Helen Hoang

11. “The only good thing this broken heart of mine can feel is love for you.”

— Helen Hoang

12. “Warm. Content. Safe in his arms. Him safe in hers. She hugged him tighter. He was bigger and stronger, but she would protect him with everything she had.”

— Helen Hoang

13. “The music raced, but time crawled.”

— Helen Hoang

14. “She had a disorder, but it didn’t define her. She was Stella. She was a unique person.”

— Helen Hoang

15. “As a society, we need to have compassion for all people affected by illness and disability – and that means those who receive care as well as those who give care. We all matter, and no one should feel like they can’t ask for help when they need it. If someone says they’re hurting, please listen. Please take them seriously. Please be kind. If you’re hurting, please be kind to yourself.”

— Helen Hoang

16. “When her mother got something into her mind, she was like a honey badger with a vendetta – pugnacious and tenacious, but with the snarling and fur.”

— Helen Hoang

17. “She was a country girl, after all. Her origins didn’t define her, but they were a part of her. She refused to be ashamed of them.”

— Helen Hoang

18. “Michael was mint chocolate chip for her. She could try other flavors, but he’d always be her favorite.”

— Helen Hoang

19. “Love, he found, was a jail. It trapped, and it clipped wings. It dragged you down, forced you to places you didn’t want to go.”

— Helen Hoang

20. “Palm to palm, two lonely halves found comfort together.”

— Helen Hoang

21. “If someone says they’re hurting, please listen. Please take them seriously. Please be kind. If you’re hurting, please be kind to yourself.”

— Helen Hoang

22. “She had that fire. She felt it. That was her worth. That was her value. She would fight for her loved ones. And she would fight for herself. Because she mattered.”

— Helen Hoang

23. “Yes, she was lonely. Yes, she had a broken heart. But at least she had herself.”

— Helen Hoang

24. “How much of what people say is genuine and how much is politeness? Is anyone really living their life or are we all reading lines from a giant script written by other people?”

— Helen Hoang

25. “I don’t have a fight-or-flight instinct. I have a freeze instinct.”

— Helen Hoang

26. “She wasn’t a photoshopped image on a magazine. She was a real person, flawed. Oddly, that made her more beautiful.”

— Helen Hoang

27. “Women buy underwear for the men they love. It’s economics. Data supports this claim.”

— Helen Hoang

28. “Thank you for giving me that choice so I could pick you. Thank you for being you. I love you.”

— Helen Hoang

29. “How did one not obsess over something wonderful? How did one like something a reasonable amount?”

— Helen Hoang

30. “He never minds. Even when they throw themselves at him. You should have seen the last one. She asked him out to dinner, and he said, ‘No, thanks, I already ate.’ ‘Dessert then?’ ‘No, I don’t eat dessert after class.’ ‘Coffee?’ ‘That will keep me up, and I have work tomorrow.”

— Helen Hoang

31. “All the things that make you different make you perfect.”

— Helen Hoang

32. “I’ve missed you.” So badly his body had broken down. “I need to know you’re safe and happy. And I want you close. With me.”

— Helen Hoang

33. “Non aveva bisogno delle persone. Lei era felicissima quando aveva spazio e tempo per focalizzarsi sulle cose che le interessavano.”

— Helen Hoang

34. “I don’t want just a night or a week or a month with you. I want you all the time. I like you better than calculus, and math is the only thing that unites the universe.”

— Helen Hoang

35. “Trovava che l’amore fosse un carcere. Intrappolava e tarpava le ali. Trascinava in un baratro, imponeva luoghi in cui non si voleva andare...”

— Helen Hoang

36. “And babies cried, soul-grating banshee wails that even the best sound-canceling headphones couldn’t buffer.”

— Helen Hoang

37. “She was a bloodthirsty villainess.”

— Helen Hoang

38. “Math is the single most elegant thing in the universe, and economics is what drives the human world. If you want to understand people in a sophisticated manner, I believe economics is the way.”

— Helen Hoang

39. “His sisters had posters of Henney plastered all over their bedroom walls, had even established a man-beauty scale of one to Henney.”

— Helen Hoang

40. “I don’t care what these hands do as long as they’re yours.”

— Helen Hoang

41. “She still shared a bed with him, but she kept her back to him and balanced on the very edge, as far away from him as possible. Sometimes, he worried she’d fall off. Other times, he hoped she’d fall off. So he’d have an excuse to tell her to come closer.”

— Helen Hoang

42. “Lips to lips, hearts melting together, no distance between them, not even an arm’s length.”

— Helen Hoang

43. “No one seemed to understand it wasn’t good-bye unless Andy said it back.”

— Helen Hoang

44. “You’re wet already, Stella. You’re like a Lamborghini. Zero to sixty in two point seven seconds.”

— Helen Hoang

45. “Just because something isn’t perfect doesn’t mean we need to throw it away.”

— Helen Hoang

46. “I see, and for the first time in my adult life, I don’t care that I’m making a scene. I haven’t hurt anyone. I shouldn’t be ashamed. I shouldn’t need to apologize. This is me.”

— Helen Hoang

47. “So beautiful. And here. She’d come to find him again. No one ever looked for him. They all knew he wanted to be alone. Except it wasn’t always that way. Sometimes he was alone out of habit. Sometimes it took effort to distract himself from the growing emptiness inside.”

— Helen Hoang

48. “She wasn’t good at lying, but she knew how to pretend she was okay.”

— Helen Hoang

49. “I have trouble focusing enough to read anything of significant length, so I find my way to poetry.”

— Helen Hoang

50. “This crusade to fix herself was ending right now. She wasn’t broken. She saw and interacted with the world in a different way, but that was her. She could change her actions, change her words, change her appearance, but she couldn’t change the root of herself. At her core, she would always be autistic. People called it a disorder, but it didn’t feel like one. To her, it was simply the way she was.”

— Helen Hoang