Top 60 J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nothing had just happened to her, she had made a choice, and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

2. “There are as many paths to God as there are souls on this Earth. Rumi.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

3. “Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity – the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

4. “Timing was everything when it came to being a woman – the moment you entered the world could seal your fate.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

5. “Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while Im walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

6. “Women leave their marriages when they can’t take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

7. “If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn’s place right now. She didn’t want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

8. “I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

9. “She had once said that she believed the women’s liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

10. “He also believed that loyalty was earned – sharing a bloodline didn’t mean you had to be close.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

11. “For whatever reason, various outlets and individuals are committed to making the world think that young girls don’t talk or care about feminism anymore, that it’s totally over. But it’s not.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

12. “I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

13. “We don’t always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can’t find a way to love us anyway.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

14. “When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

15. “Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

16. “In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might become.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

17. “The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

18. “What would you have today if you woke up with only the things you thanked God for yesterday?” He wondered.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

19. “She thought about him all the time – not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

20. “There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

21. “It wasn’t right that you could only understand your parents’ pain once you’d experienced the things they had, and by then they were gone.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

22. “You all seem to think you should marry someone when you feel this intense emotion, which you call love. And then you expect the love will fade over time, as life gets harder. When what you should do is find yourself a nice enough fellow and let real love develop over years and births and deaths and so on.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

23. “That was something no one ever told you. That you would have to get to know your own children.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

24. “Beyond those was a stretch of sand and miles of dark blue sea. You couldn’t make out a thing on the other side. As a little girl, Maggie believed that the world dropped off out there, that if you swam far enough you might fall into a starry sky.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

25. “The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

26. “This was a bargain she struck, a ritual to guarantee safety. Nothing truly bad could happen if she was expecting it.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

27. “I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

28. “A kid thinks her mother is just that – hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn’t want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women’s private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn’t.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

29. “April’s just a Dixie cup of crazy. Lydia’s more like a twenty-gallon tank.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

30. “It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

31. “It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk around leaking it everywhere. It could lie dormant inside you for days, weeks, years. You could seem a perfectly whole person to everyone you met. Without warning, grief might poke you in the ribs, punch you in the gut, knock the wind out of you. But even then, you seemed just fine. The world went on and on.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

32. “Each of Nora’s children had arrived on this earth as him or herself, the more she knew them, the more she felt it to be true. They were so different from one another, and from her.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

33. “With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

34. “A million different ways. I think of what my mother did when I was a kid, confiding in me about my father’s affairs. Needing me to indulge her every insecurity. A child shouldn’t be so aware of her mother’s demons. A child shouldn’t know her mother has demons at all. Is that right?”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

35. “I think we’re just different sorts of people, me and you. You’re a planner. Everything has to be perfectly aligned before you make a move, or you’re afraid the whole damn world will come crashing down. For me, it’s more like, “We’re having a baby. Now what?”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

36. “Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

37. “When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she’d give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

38. “She had learned over time that to know anything was bearable. It was secrecy that could not be borne.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

39. “Motherhood was a physical act as much as an emotional one. It took every part of you.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

40. “She wished more than anything to be that child again. Someone for whom all decisions were made, and love was background noise; uneventful, absolute.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

41. “It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

42. “This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn’t hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, demanded even more than that.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

43. “The dogs were partly responsible for keeping her sane. The relationship she had with them was pure joy. No ulterior motives, no spite, just love and care and kindness, exactly the emotions she wanted to cultivate.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

44. “The men didn’t last – that was something they never told you when you were young and desperately searching for one, thinking he’d make your life all that it was supposed to be. No, in the end, it was only women; in the end, just sisters.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

45. “She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father’s clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

46. “I love the smell of a mans skin.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

47. “Old age had distilled her down to her essence.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

48. “One of life’s contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

49. “And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to approve of it.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan

50. “It was her way of drawing a line between them and herself, playing the observer so she didn’t have to care whether or not she fit in.”

— J. Courtney Sullivan