Top 250 Jennifer Donnelly Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Why do you always want to read about other people’s lives, Matt? Ain’t your own good enough for you.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

152. “I need a boy who thinks with his big head, not his little one. Since they do not exist, I have fashioned my own.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

153. “We who have means and a voice must use them to help those who have neither. Yet how can we help them if we don’t even know about them? And how can we know about them if no one writes about them? Is it so wrong to want to know things?”

— Jennifer Donnelly

154. “Sera was beginning to see that love wasn’t pretty words and easy promises. Love was hard. It challenged you and changed you. It filled your heart and sometimes hardened it too. Love demanded sacrifices. She’d made many over the last few weeks, and knew she would be called upon to make many more.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

155. “I could solve all the Diophantine equations, extend Newton’s work on infinite series, complete Euler’s analysis of prime numbers, and it wouldn’t matter.” She looked at Isabelle. “Ella is the beauty. You and I are the ugly stepsisters. And so the world reduces us, all three of us, to our lowest common denominator.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

156. “The cuts were the truth, written in blood, and no one must ever read it. Rulers were ruthless. They did not show weakness or fear. They did not cry. They made others cry. Hadn’t her stepmother told her that a thousand times?”

— Jennifer Donnelly

157. “I want to have hope, I can’t help it, but I’m almost afraid to,” Serafina.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

158. “Elizabeth walked through the path they’d cleared and up to the towering book. She kicked the cover with a well-shod foot. It slammed shut. Then she dipped her brush into the bucket, crossed out the word history, dipped the brush again, and wrote HER STORY in its place.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

159. “The truth is usually inappropriate.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

160. “Her eyes drank in the colors of home – the soft gray of an arctic gull’s wing. The clear blue heart of an ice floe.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

161. “I love you, too... I won’t ever leave you again. I promise. I kept that promise. For love him I did. For nearly two years I spent almost every waking hour with him. Until he was taken from me. But I never left him. And I never will.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

162. “But you are a different sort of girl. Not at all what I expected you to be. And this is a different sort of time. And so I am hopeful for all the things you may yet find.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

163. “Life, Rose well knew, could throw some hard punches at you, but nothing hurt as much as losing a child, or seeing one of your children hurt and suffering. Becoming a parent changed you forever, as nothing else could. Not good or bad fortune. Not friendships. Not even a man or a woman.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

164. “Revolutions come about when small things happen to small people.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

165. “No. I meant stay with me today. And tomorrow. And every day after.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

166. “How it grieves me to think that the world always wins... but it goes on, this world, stupid and brutal. But I do not. I do not.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

167. “Because just for a few seconds, someone else hurts, too. For just a few seconds, I’m not alone.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

168. “I grew up on a mixed diet of mass and class, and I still read that way. I hate it when people apologize for what they read. Some bestsellers aren’t exactly literary. So what? They’re fun and rip-roaring, Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer them? Grrrrr!”

— Jennifer Donnelly

169. “Who knew that listening to a guy sleep could be so much deeper than sleeping with a guy.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

170. “I was only glad to be saved and never once thought to ask why.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

171. “That’s not the question, Isabelle,” he said softly. “The question is, why do you believe them?”

— Jennifer Donnelly

172. “Who needs make-believe monsters when there are so many real ones.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

173. “But what if you don’t like your own story. What then?”

— Jennifer Donnelly

174. “I’M SO GLAD you’re not dumb, Yaz,” Neela said. Yazeed shot her a sidelong glace. “I thought you were going to say dead.” “That, too.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

175. “Murder is not a suitable topic of conversation for a young lady.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

176. “Mortals aren’t born strong, they become strong.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

177. “When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

178. “Isn’t that what a good story does? It pulls you in and never lets you go.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

179. “May Delano looked up from her book. “What’s a wayward girl?” she asked. Jo groaned. “Never mind,” Trudy said. “Tell me,” May whined. “Very well,” Trudy replied, turning to look at May. “A girl who is with child but without a husband.” May laughed. “Shows what you know, Trudy Van Eyck. The stork brings babies after you’re married, not before.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

180. “Go now, girl. Remake the world.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

181. “I’m always doing things I can’t do. Otherwise, I’d never get to do them.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

182. “You’d live happily ever after. On nothing but love and pastries.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

183. “I’ve been in contact with her. She approached me months ago. I know the terms of her deal. She’s going to tell Ragnar that Ondalina’s attack on Miromara was an act of war and that he must surrender. Either he accepts Lucia.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

184. “Jealousy. It burns so hot, so bright. It devours you until you’re just a smoking ruin with nothing left inside. Nothing but ashes.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

185. “The guitar’s still around me. I slip it off and put it down. I want to feel him. To feel his breath on my neck. The warmth of his skin. To feel something other than sadness. Hold me, I tell him silently. Hold me here. To this place. This life. Make me want you. Want this. Want something. Please.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

186. “My choice”, he’d whispered, taking her hand. “Mine. Not theirs.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

187. “Ambition and poverty are powerful motivators...”

— Jennifer Donnelly

188. “Thousands of musical voices, like rain on water, beckoned.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

189. “As a child, she’d thought all the noise and commotion was the most wild, wonderful game, but as she’d grown older, she understood why everyone rushed around so: they were chasing a story.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

190. “I struggled for a long time to get anything published.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

191. “His arms around her felt like nothing she’d ever known and everything she’d ever wanted.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

192. “The stomach is easily satisfied. It’s the hunger in our hearts that kills us.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

193. “Mirror, mirror on the wall... who will bring about my fall?”

— Jennifer Donnelly

194. “Very. I ground the lenses myself. The left gives you hindsight; the right, foresight.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

195. “Home’s all the people, all the places, and all the things that you love. You carry it wherever you go.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

196. “Ghosts are not the dead, come back from the grave to torment the living; ghosts are already here. They live inside us, keening in the ashes of our sorrows, mired in the thick, clutching mud of our regrets.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

197. “An escape can become escapism before we even know it. Books are wonderful things, but you can’t live in someone else’s story. You have to live your own story.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

198. “He was a flame and she’d gotten burned, and the pain was terrible, yet it didn’t make the fire any less alluring.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

199. “Sometimes the things that make us all wrong is the thing that make us perfect.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

200. “The thing is, you can’t ever really know how rotten someone will turn out to be.”

— Jennifer Donnelly