Top 40 Jaclyn Moriarty Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Distance is the journey. Displacement is the result.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

2. “I am a student of love.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

3. “I’m screwed up, mixed up, messed around, dive-bombing, crashing and burning.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

4. “I hope you feel better today. Please ring me at work if you are dead.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

5. “It’s tricky being shy. You blame yourself for it, and other people blame you too.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

6. “Are you sure you want me to go after Christina? Lately I’ve kind of thought I might just give up on that. Plus, didn’t you and I need to gaze into each other’s eyes first? How will I know how to gaze at Christina? And my pebble kicking? Disaster.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

7. “You’re making me nervous by being so weird. But your weirdness is what I like about you.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

8. “I love her bare legs from a distance. When she’s standing by a pool. When she’s facing the water, thinking. Her legs are white as watermelon rind, veined blue from cold. There’s that ‘H’ shape behind her knees. The H trembles softly with the swimming-water cold.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

9. “Well, first you have to be very, very funny. I have realized that it is essential for a boy to be funny. Otherwise, what is the point in a boy?”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

10. “Men speak in absolutes, women in uncertainties, and this often strikes us as a weakness in women, but it’s knowledge: a knowledge that we cannot know, not ever.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

11. “Brookfield High School. How may I direct your call? No, sir, this is not a waste- disposal unit, I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

12. “Here come the colours of Madeleine, thought Jack, and the colours went right through his bloodstream now, sailing on tiny boats – spinnakers fixed with little toothpicks.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

13. “The world is made of more than particles. It’s made of things you can’t hold in your hand, like fear, love, loss, hope, truth.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

14. “Well, this might sound stupid but I think he was my best friend. Like the other half of me. I’m so scared something might have happened to him when he went back. I miss him so much sometimes I look at windows and I want to just walk right through them – like press myself through the glass. I want their sharp edges to fragment me.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

15. “What does it mean?” Emily said, in a low, panicked voice: “What does it mean if a rainbow comes before rain?”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

16. “As if Riley and Amelia were lions, and we were a menage a trois of lively, prancing deer.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

17. “Do you think there could be a universe next door?”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

18. “People always tell me I shouldn’t run so far because I’m too young and my bones will fall to pieces. But I do it anyway-mainly because I love the bit when you finish and get to stop running.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

19. “Sure, we sparkled and glittered and flew through the world, but it was only an illusion of flight. We were trapped in the orbit of a man who was no longer truly there.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

20. “I was still seeing pirates in my old way, as almost-imaginary, adventure-story people with parrots on their shoulders, rather than the kind who shoot cannons at parents.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

21. “If you’re bored tonight why don’t you write down everything that comes to mind when you hear the word toothpaste?”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

22. “You’ve loved with intensity and passion, and have learned to hide your heartache, learned to press your handkerchief back into your pocket and pretend that you are okay.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

23. “You should have seen her this morning,′ he said, smiling. ‘She’s got into the pantry and tipped a box of Cheerios all over the kitchen floor. I walk in and she’s crawling around eating them as fast as she can. Mum’s standing there, watching her – she got this embarrassed look when she saw me – she does, ‘I know, I know, but I can’t bring myself to stop her. She thinks she’s hit the jackpot.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

24. “Her skin is pale as watermelon sucked free of its juices.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

25. “How about we meet at midnight tomorrow and try this. I close my eyes, believe in you, and there you’ll be.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

26. “Where are they now? she thought. Her iPod, her iPhone, her iPad, the I-ness of her life? Her mind stretched around in its memories, searching for her things: She saw her phone on the hotel bedside table in Paris; her iPad in her Louis Vuitton urban satchel; her iPod slipping from her pocket in the restaurant, the night before she ran away.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

27. “Mrs. Cheerson, our old teacher? She gave us an essay to write over the holiday. It was on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and it was good, and I think it’s stupid to spoil a good book by writing an essay on it. So I didn’t do it.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

28. “Where was she now, the girl with the thunderstorm heart?”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

29. “It’s a lot easier to be crazy or mad than to just get on with living.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

30. “There was something in the moonlight tonight. It was stroking the stonework and spires, leaning into cracks between the cobblestones, caressing the stained-glass windows. She felt her heart lift with magic.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

31. “If you’re looking pretty and your hair’s all shiny, and there’s a glint in your eye, and you say sorry like you mean it, and then kiss me on the mouth and let your hand kind of slip under my shirt so it’s on my back, well, I’d sure forgive and forget.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

32. “Madeleine Tully turned fourteen yesterday, but today she did not turn anything. Oh, wait. She turned a page.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

33. “Popular self-help teaches you to ask for help, accept help, set boundaries, say no. So you ask for help and the person you ask politely refuses. Because he or she has learned to set boundaries and say no.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

34. “There was one true thing. Madeleine. The relief was beautiful. He fell asleep imagining her hands in his hands, holding one another in the darkness.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

35. “We needed fish, really, but I could not speak Fish.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

36. “All books have magical properties.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

37. “Their chairs were huge and soft, the kind that swivel and make squelching noises whenever you shift your behind. Aunt Isabelle and I had regular, hard-backed chairs. So at first, I didn’t concentrate on what the lawyers were saying because I felt too angry about this. Why didn’t we have the soft, fun, swivelling chairs?”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

38. “There is no right or wrong; there is no one truth, there are lots of truths. And you girls should translate the world into as many different languages as possible. If you see the world in just one language, your world becomes too small.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

39. “I suspected other people were better at living than me. Did others elbow their way through fog, rising out of it somedays, relief blending with terror at its return?”

— Jaclyn Moriarty

40. “You do know the answers to most of your problems. Somewhere deep inside, you know.”

— Jaclyn Moriarty