Top 160 Iain Reid Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “It seems to me, maybe for the first time, that there are varying degrees of dead. Like there are varying degrees of everything: of being alive, of being in love, of being committed, of being sure. These lambs aren’t sleepwalking through life. They aren’t discouraged or sick. They aren’t thinking about giving up. These tailless lambs are dead, extremely dead, ten-out-of-ten dead.”

— Iain Reid

102. “What’s going to happen will happen regardless. Awareness is beside the point.”

— Iain Reid

103. “Most people want to get married. Is there anything else that people do in such huge numbers, with such a terrible success rate?”

— Iain Reid

104. “I’m thinking of childhood. Memories. I can’t stop myself. Those moments of childhood I haven’t thought about in years or ever.”

— Iain Reid

105. “He was watching me. That’s why he was there.”

— Iain Reid

106. “What if suffering doesn’t end with death? How can we know? What if it doesn’t get better? What if death isn’t an escape?”

— Iain Reid

107. “Maybe we’re not supposed to know all the answers. Questions are good. They’re better than answers. If you want to know more about life, how we work, how we progress, it’s questions that are important. That’s what pushes and stretches our intellect. I think questions make us feel less lonely and more connected. It’s not always about knowing. I appreciate not knowing. Not knowing is human. That’s how it should be, like space. It’s unsolvable, and it’s dark, but not entirely.”

— Iain Reid

108. “Maybe it’s impossible. Maybe even in the longest, closest, most successful marriages, the one partner doesn’t always know what the other is thinking. We’re never inside someone else’s head. We can never really know someone else’s thoughts. And it’s thoughts that count. Thought is reality. Actions can be faked.”

— Iain Reid

109. “Sometimes even good news can prime you psychosomatically. It can play havoc with people mentally. I hope things have been stable.”

— Iain Reid

110. “What came before is hard to remember. Not that I want to. Those times don’t matter. Now is what’s important, not then.”

— Iain Reid

111. “We’ve been everywhere. There’s nowhere else to go.”

— Iain Reid

112. “I guess, more than anything, I want to be myself,” he says. “I want to be. To be me.”

— Iain Reid

113. “Forfeiting solitude, independence, is a much greater sacrifice than most of us realize.”

— Iain Reid

114. “But I think now’s the best time to ask. It’s the only time to ask.”

— Iain Reid

115. “Nothing makes sense. I want this to end.”

— Iain Reid

116. “I don’t often talk – or even think – about it. It’s sort of a nebulous, patchy memory. But the parts I recall, I remember with clarity.”

— Iain Reid

117. “It’s just very hard to talk about. Once I bring up these doubts, I can’t go back.”

— Iain Reid

118. “It would have been nice to see her again, even just to talk, but he never did. He thought he might run into her. He hoped that kind of chance existed. It might have been easier the second time, that it might have progressed. But he didn’t get that chance. It never happened.”

— Iain Reid

119. “I was never inspired by something whole. It was always a fragment, a crumb, a piece of a moment, a half-forgotten impression, one side of a person. Never fully formed because it could only be my view of a thing, not someone else’s.”

— Iain Reid

120. “It hurts, all of it, but we feel nothing.”

— Iain Reid

121. “I’ll never know why we came to this place, how I ended up confined like this, how I ended up so alone. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Why me?”

— Iain Reid

122. “It’s amazing that relationships can form and last under the constraints of never fully knowing. Never knowing for sure what the other person is thinking. Never knowing for sure who a person is.”

— Iain Reid

123. “Nothing wakes me up like a laugh, really, even just one big laugh, as long as it’s sincere. It’s better than caffeine.”

— Iain Reid

124. “It seems to me, maybe for the first time, that there are varying degrees of dead. Like there are varying degrees of everything: of being alive, of being in love, of being committed, of being sure.”

— Iain Reid

125. “There’s no noise outside the door. No knock. I didn’t hear any footsteps. It’s just a feeling. But it’s strong. I think someone’s right outside the door. Are they listening?”

— Iain Reid

126. “I’d only been half listening when he said it, so I’m surprised by how clearly I’m recalling his words now.”

— Iain Reid

127. “I end up in the common room, the early-morning light, almost blue in color, not full sun yet. This has always been my favorite time of day because it doesn’t last. I would go to the park just for this magical hour. It’s so easy to miss. Everyone takes it for granted every single day they wake up. It’s only a moment. It’s magical, it’s beautiful.”

— Iain Reid

128. “It was weird to be all alone again for those two days when he was away. That was what I’d been used to, before, but after, it felt insufficient. I missed him. I missed being with another person.”

— Iain Reid

129. “We can’t go back upstairs again. We can’t. We tried. We really tried. We did our best. How long can we suffer?”

— Iain Reid

130. “I was the physical embodiment of the numerical mean.”

— Iain Reid

131. “He knows we have nowhere to go. He knew all along.”

— Iain Reid

132. “It does seem like there’s more opportunity to reflect on sadness and feelings of inadequacy, and also a pressure to be happy all the time. Which is impossible.”

— Iain Reid

133. “There are so many things like this. Everything is impossibly fragile.”

— Iain Reid

134. “How do we know when something is menacing? What cues us that something is not innocent? Instinct always trumps reason. At night, when I wake up alone, the memory still terrifies me. It scares me the older I get. Each time I remember it, it seems worse, more sinister. Maybe each time I remember it, I make it worse than it was. I don’t know.”

— Iain Reid

135. “The idea that we are better off with one person for the rest of our lives is not an innate truth of existence. It’s a belief we want to be true.”

— Iain Reid

136. “I’ve been so careful. So self-aware. I’m confused less. I haven’t been reckless. I understand myself. My own limitless potential. There is so much potential. And now this. How did I get here? It’s not fair.”

— Iain Reid

137. “Her face starts to hurt from so much smiling.”

— Iain Reid

138. “Are some things meant to be, meant to happen? There are some things we can’t explain. Some call it fate. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe we don’t have to know more than that. Maybe the orbit we inhabit is preordained. I’m okay with it even if I don’t really believe in that kind of thing. You can hold beliefs and not always believe in them.”

— Iain Reid

139. “A shock, no matter how potent, always wears off with time.”

— Iain Reid

140. “There’s no definitive border between the start and the end. We’ll never fully understand or know it. We can’t.”

— Iain Reid

141. “Maybe if we had all the time in the world, life would start to feel meaningless. Or worse.”

— Iain Reid

142. “But we can’t, even the most practical-minded of us, understand the world through rationality, not entirely. We depend on symbols for meaning.”

— Iain Reid

143. “You can’t be only alone.”

— Iain Reid

144. “The idea that we are better off with one person for the rest of our lives is not an innate truth of existence. It’s a belief we want to be true. Forfeiting solitude, independence, is a much greater sacrifice than most of us realize. Sharing a habitat, a life, is for sure harder than being alone. In fact, coupled living seems virtually impossible, doesn’t it? To find another person to spend all your life with? To age with and change with? To see every day, to respond to their moods and needs?”

— Iain Reid

145. “What cues us that something is not innocent? Instinct always trumps reason.”

— Iain Reid

146. “Now he asks me? After all this time?”

— Iain Reid

147. “He told me he likes the phot because it’s him, yet physically, he’s completely different now from the child he sees in the photo. He doesn’t just mean he looks different but that every cell captured in the image has died, been shed and replaced by new cells.”

— Iain Reid

148. “It’s not heart-stopping or intense or bloodcurdling or graphic or violent. No jump scares. To me, these qualities aren’t usually scary. Something that disorients, that unsettles what’s taken for granted, something that disturbs and disrupts reality – that’s scary.”

— Iain Reid

149. “Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other. But reality happens only once.”

— Iain Reid

150. “If he were here, that would mean I’m not alone, that I would be safe.”

— Iain Reid