Top 40 Jamie Ford Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The hardest choices in life aren’t between what’s right and what’s wrong but between what’s right and what’s best.”

— Jamie Ford

2. “All good things come to an end. All bad things go on forever.”

— Jamie Ford

3. “Some things just can’t be put back together. Some things can never be fixed. Two broken pieces can’t make a lot of anything anymore. But at least he had the broken pieces.”

— Jamie Ford

4. “Hope can get you through anything.”

— Jamie Ford

5. “The library is like a candy store where everything is free.”

— Jamie Ford

6. “He’d do what he always did, find the sweet among the bitter.”

— Jamie Ford

7. “Seeing isn’t believing. Feeling is believing.”

— Jamie Ford

8. “I think I get it now. It doesn’t matter how nice home is – it just matters that it feels like home.”

— Jamie Ford

9. “He’d learned long ago: perfection isn’t what families are all about.”

— Jamie Ford

10. “But choosing to lovingly care for her was like steering a plane into a mountain as gently as possible. The crash is imminent; it’s how you spend your time on the way down that counts.”

— Jamie Ford

11. “As an author, I get paid to break my own heart on a regular basis.”

— Jamie Ford

12. “Henry was learning that time apart has a way of creating distance- more than mountains and time zone separating them. Real distance, the kind that makes you ache and stop wondering. Longing so bad that it begins to hurt to care so much.”

— Jamie Ford

13. “I try not to live in the past, he thought, but who knows, sometimes the past lives in me.”

— Jamie Ford

14. “There are people in our lives whom we love, and lose, and unfailingly long for. They orbit our hearts like Halley’s Comet, crossing into our universe only once, or if we are lucky, twice in a lifetime.”

— Jamie Ford

15. “I am what you made me, Father.”

— Jamie Ford

16. “As you play this record, I hope you’ll think of the good, not the bad. Of what was, not what wasn’t meant to be. Of the time we spent together, not the time we’ve spent apart. Most of all I hop you’ll think of me...”

— Jamie Ford

17. “After a lifetime of nods, frowns and stoic smiles, they were both fluent in emotional shorthand.”

— Jamie Ford

18. “Like so many things Henry had wanted in life – like his father, his marriage, his life – it had arrived a little damaged. Imperfect. But he didn’t care, this was all he’d wanted. Something to hope for, and he’d found it. It didn’t matter what condition it was in.”

— Jamie Ford

19. “From character Henry Lee in the Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, ” He’d learned long ago: perfection isn’t what families are all about”. Love it!”

— Jamie Ford

20. “We all have things we don’t talk about, Ernest thought. Even though, more often than not, those are the things that make us who we are.”

— Jamie Ford

21. “It reminded him that time was short, but that beautiful endings could still be found at the end of cold, dreary days.”

— Jamie Ford

22. “Henry looked up and down the empty avenue – no cars or trucks anywhere. No bicycles. No paperboys. No fruit sellers or fish buyers. No flower carts or noodle stands. The streets were vacant, empty – the way he felt inside. There was no one left.”

— Jamie Ford

23. “Happiness. Sadness. Like all things, they both come to an end.”

— Jamie Ford

24. “Sometimes you need to feel the sadness, you need to feel everything to finally leave it behind, to have peace. Happiness. Sadness. Like all things, they both come to an end.”

— Jamie Ford

25. “But the most surprising difference was Show Street, the topless corner of Seattle’s second world’s fair, where fairgoers could rent Polaroid cameras to snap photos of showgirls in various stages of undress.”

— Jamie Ford

26. “My theory,” Maisie said, “is that the best, worst, happiest, saddest, scariest, and most memorable moments are all connected. Those are the important times, good and bad. The rest is just filler.”

— Jamie Ford

27. “Gracie’s memory was like a jigsaw puzzle with parts that didn’t always fit, but she’d found the all-important edge pieces. She was beginning to reframe her life – their life. It was a work in progress, but the image was coming together. “It’s.”

— Jamie Ford

28. “People relations is hard business. Hard to keep that going.”

— Jamie Ford

29. “Reality stripped of the armor of optimism was nothing but naked truth – pale and weak.”

— Jamie Ford

30. “Ernest glanced about at all the faces – happy, sad, and in between – they’d become his family. He had come to love his new life. It wasn’t without ugliness, but it felt so much more true and honest, richer and more satisfying than life under Mrs. Irvine and the custodial care of the state.”

— Jamie Ford

31. “She’d never felt more alone, even as hundreds of people walked by. No one recognized her, and she began to treasure her anonymity as a gift.”

— Jamie Ford

32. “The truth of the matter was that these days Gracie barely remembered him. Her mind had become a one-way mirror. Ernest could see her clearly, but to Gracie he’d been lost behind her troubled, distorted reflection.”

— Jamie Ford

33. “The standout, though, was Maisie May, who’d been growing her hair longer. Ernest had never seen her in a corset before, and he wondered what battle had been fought to get her into one of those spoon-billed contraptions. He imagined an angry, feral, six-toed cat, with long claws and no tail, hissing while being dunked into icy water.”

— Jamie Ford

34. “The waitress brought a fresh pot of tea, and Marty refilled his father’s cup and poured a cup for Samantha. Henry in turn filled Marty’s. It was a tradition Henry cherished – never filling your own cup, always filling that of someone else, who would return the favor.”

— Jamie Ford

35. “He was used to people staring at him on the street – the villagers who’d spat at him or laughed. But for now he felt safely surrounded, comforted, as he drew a deep breath and melted into the girls’ kindness.”

— Jamie Ford

36. “You can’t expect children to sew their own gaping wounds without leaving a terrible scar.”

— Jamie Ford

37. “Moths flitted in the porch light, pinging against the bulb, helplessly drawn to something they could never have.”

— Jamie Ford

38. “Seeing isn’t believing, feeling is believing.” She reached out and patted his coat, finding the space above his heart, where the handbill was safely tucked away. “I feel you.”

— Jamie Ford

39. “All of this, everything I have, was built on the idea that despite the unfair labor laws, the damnable exclusion act designed to keep your kind out – bringing people like you.”

— Jamie Ford

40. “Memories are narcotic, he thought. Like the array of pill bottles that sit cluttered on my nightstand. Each dose, carefully administered, use as directed. Too much and they become dangerous. Too much and they’ll stop your heart.”

— Jamie Ford

41. “Ernest had lain awake many nights and wondered. Girls were complicated, women confounding, their challenges almost insurmountable. The world was a rigged game, stacked against them. But maybe Maisie had played to her advantage.”

— Jamie Ford

42. “The most important lesson I can teach you is to never settle for what others want you to be. Find a way to be the person you need to be to truly be happy. Don’t give in to convention. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Marriage to the wrong person is like stepping in quicksand, you lose yourself, bit by bit, slowly suffocating until your disappear completely.”

— Jamie Ford

43. “That’s the point, isn’t it? To keep learning. To grow. To do more good than harm. To create compassion. To understand that every person you encounter is not there by coincidence. All of us play a role in another person’s life. What goes around comes around.”

— Jamie Ford

44. “In America, a lie becomes the truth with sufficient repetition.”

— Jamie Ford

45. “He suspected that everyone his age, of his vintage, had a backstory, a secret that they’d never shared.”

— Jamie Ford

46. “We don’t have to grieve only those we know. Sometimes we grieve for that which was lost. That which was never allowed to be.”

— Jamie Ford