Top 250 Jennifer Donnelly Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Lots of things are impossible,” she said softly. “Until they’re not.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

152. “Believe that you can make your way. Or don’t. Either way, you are right.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

153. “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

154. “Airports should all belong to the same country. The country of Crappacia. Or Bleakovania. Or Suckitan.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

155. “I think your vision gets better as you get older.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

161. “The truth is usually inappropriate.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

164. “Why do you always want to read about other people’s lives, Matt? Ain’t your own good enough for you.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

165. “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

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

173. “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

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

183. “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

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

187. “One expects decent people to stand up for the good of all. Decent people shut their doors and hide behind them as decent people do. Massacres could never happen if it weren’t for decent people.”

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

197. “Whatever you do or dream you can do – begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.”

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

— Jennifer Donnelly

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

— Jennifer Donnelly