Top 50 Jayne Ann Krentz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Friends may come and go but enemies accumulate.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

2. “Absolute certainty is the greatest of all illusions.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

3. “Today I will focus on priorities and ignore the unimportant crap.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

4. “Life is too short to waste time on books that end badly.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

5. “Embrace the unknown. It is the only certainty.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

6. “It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

7. “I love threats. They make great quotes. Is that recorder working, Irene?”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

8. “The romance genre is the only genre where readers are guaranteed novels that place the heroine at the heart of the story. These are books that celebrate women’s heroic virtues and values: courage, honor, determination and a belief in the healing power of love.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

9. “Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on the earth, the human male, to his knees.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

Featured in: Romance Quotes

10. “There can be no true definition of normal because life is ever-changing.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

11. “We all make the best choices we can with the information we have available at the time we have to make them. None of us ever has enough information to be absolutely sure we’re making the right choice.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

12. “Lucy frowned. “What’s the Three-S rule?” “Shoot, shovel and shut up.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

13. “Showing signs of weakness was a good way to get eaten.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

14. “The negative attitudes toward the genres – romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. – are fallout from the academic world’s long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

15. “Trust me, I did not set out to establish three pen names and, for the record, I do not recommend it as a career strategy. The idea back at the start was that I would stick with the name that proved most successful.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

16. “If you don’t give yourself room to fail, Zack, you’ll live your life inside an iron cage that will gradually get smaller and smaller until you can’t even breathe.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

17. “A secret is only a secret as long as only one person knows it.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

18. “I should have known better than to take a job as an assistant to a psychic detective.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

19. “The concept of psychic energy is easy for most people to imagine. After all, it’s just one step beyond intuition – and almost everyone is comfortable with the idea of intuition.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

20. “Maybe he’s got a plan for proving that he was a victim of unethical research practices. Who knows? I can’t begin to guess his objectives but I can promise you that there is nothing you or I or modern para-pharmaceuticals can do for him. We can’t fix the monsters.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

21. “Grandma always said that people don’t change, at least not way down deep inside where it counts.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

22. “Sometimes it’s a mistake to look too far down the road. There are times in life when you can’t be sure of the pattern. You have to meet circumstances as they are.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

23. “It occurred to her that after what he must have seen in the course of his FBI profiling work, death by garden tools was probably a fairly tame scenario.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

24. “I read what I like to write: romantic suspense. I also love thrillers and novels of suspense, but I can’t handle extreme violence and torture.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

25. “Panic attacks were like earthquakes. It wasn’t a matter of if there would be another one. It was only a question of when it would strike. She had discovered the hard way that it might be weeks, months or even years between attacks. Or it could be tomorrow night.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

26. “The woman always wins. With courage, intelligence, and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

27. “One thing I’ve learned over the years is that nobody really wants my good advice. They just pretend to listen to it.” “Probably because most people just want to whine about their problems. They don’t want to actually take the hard actions that will fix those problems.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

28. “Life never stood still, no matter how hard you tried to hold onto it.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

29. “The very fact that you can even wonder if you’re going crazy means you very likely aren’t crazy. Real nuts don’t question their own nuttiness. They think they’re the only normal ones. That’s why they’re nuts.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

30. “When we were growing up, Cooper Island was our whole world.” “And then we went out into a much bigger world, so the island and everything on it now seem smaller in comparison.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

31. “All of her hormones had sat bolt upright and immediately launched into a stirring rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

32. “But they said that you could find anyone these days, thanks to the Internet.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

33. “She wanted to scream her rage to the uncaring universe, but she couldn’t breathe.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

34. “Life is too short to waste time on books that end badly.” “By badly you mean unhappily, right?” “As far as I’m concerned, the two are synonymous.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

35. “Run if you can because, in spite of how it looks on television, it’s hard to hit a moving target. If you can’t run, fight and fight dirty. Go for the eyes. Think of every object around you as a weapon. Strike fast and hard when you get the chance because you’ll only get one chance.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

36. “The hero in a romance is the most important challenge the heroine must face and conquer. The hero is her real problem in the book, not whatever trendy issue or daring adventure is also going on in the subplot. In some way, shape, or form, in some manner either real or perceived on the heroine’s part, the hero must be a source of emotional and, yes, sometimes physical risk. He must present a genuine threat.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

37. “When it comes to this kind of thing we can all hold out helping hands to each other, doctors can supply some very helpful medications, but in the end, each of us has to have the will to swim to shore on our own. No one can carry another person. Not for long, at any rate.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

38. “Funny thing about the past. The older you get, the less it matters.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

39. “Mary Jo Putney is a gifted writer with an intuitive understanding of what makes romances work. I loved Silk and Shadows, couldn’t put it down, and don’t think readers will, either.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

Featured in: Romance Quotes

40. “At Rainy Creek Gardens she had finally begun to realize that, no matter your age, when you looked back it always seemed that your life had passed in the blink of an eye. The past could not be changed and the future was unknowable. The residents of Rainy Creek Gardens were teaching her that the real trick to a good life was to learn to live in the present.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

41. “I didn’t come in here to argue with a woman with big hair.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

42. “Find one lousy body in your aunt’s fireplace and the first thing you know everyone is talking.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

43. “Role models or not, in the end every man has to decide for himself just what kind of man he will be.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

44. “Write Your Life group was a popular program at the Rainy Creek Gardens Retirement Village.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

45. “Pretty much everything about you gets me hot.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

46. “He had made his decision regarding Molly with great care and consideration.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

47. “There is no Great American Novel,” she said absently. “This nation is too big and too diverse to produce only one great book. We’ve got lots of them and there will be more written in the future. Art doesn’t stand still.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

48. “You don’t forget nightmares, but when they’ve been exposed to enough sunlight, they fade.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

49. “Being present at the creation of a full-blown conspiracy theory. It’s like watching a galaxy being born. Lots of random, unconnected bits and pieces of matter whiz past each other, exert a little gravitational pull and bingo, they start forming an organized system. The next thing you know you have a complete, wheels-within-wheels fantasy involving the CIA, Area 51, cosmic energy and a dead guy.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz

50. “She knew enough about him to realize that no one would ever understand him unless he wished it, and that was highly unlikely. He was a man who operated alone, working by his own rules even when he was doing a job for his employers. Emily thought of him in the same way she thought of hurricanes, charging lions and marauding sharks. The only sensible thing to do when any of them was in the vicinity was to get out of the way.”

— Jayne Ann Krentz