Top 50 Jennifer McMahon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not the gun you should be scared of – it’s the crazy man with the gun.”

— Jennifer McMahon

2. “If snow melts down to water, does it still remember being snow?”

— Jennifer McMahon

3. “Ain’t no point worrying about what’s been or what’s gonna be. You just gotta do your best right now. And trust everyone else is doing the same.”

— Jennifer McMahon

4. “Storytelling wasn’t about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.”

— Jennifer McMahon

5. “Monsters are real. They’re all around us, whether we can see them or not.”

— Jennifer McMahon

6. “White space. Blank canvas. Intimidating, but thrilling beyond belief. Anything can happen. When was the last time her art mattered?”

— Jennifer McMahon

7. “All great heroes have a flaw. It’s one of the things that makes them heroes.”

— Jennifer McMahon

8. “No one sees the world like you do, Emma. Creating art is about sharing your own personal vision with the world. Taking something no one else can see and bringing it to life.”

— Jennifer McMahon

9. “Sometimes a butterfly is not just a butterfly. This is what Oma taught me. You know the worst thing I learned from her? You can be a monster and not even know you are one. They look like us. They think they are us. But really, they’ve got a monster hiding inside.”

— Jennifer McMahon

10. “Sometimes what a person needs most is to be forgiven.”

— Jennifer McMahon

11. “In the water, dark and deep where she waits, fast asleep All alone, pale and cold, don’t wake her up, or she’ll catch hold Her soothing voice, so soft and low is the last thing you’ll ever know Four simple words whispered in your ear, a gentle wind only you can hear: Come swimming with me.”

— Jennifer McMahon

12. “I think people see what they want to see... But think about it: if you’d lost someone you love, wouldn’t you give almost anything to have the chance to see them again?”

— Jennifer McMahon

13. “Some people are made stronger by loss. Others are broken by it.”

— Jennifer McMahon

14. “The world was full of dangers now that she was pregnant: mercury in tuna, hot tubs, beer, secondhand smoke, over-the-counter medicine. Not to mention crazy baby-abducting fairy kings.”

— Jennifer McMahon

15. “The people who are stuck between here and there, waiting. It reminds me of winter, how everything is all pale and cold and full of nothing, and all you can do is wait for spring.”

— Jennifer McMahon

16. “Think of me. Remember me. Love me.”

— Jennifer McMahon

17. “Shape your reality. Make it true because you say it is.”

— Jennifer McMahon

18. “What people don’t understand, they destroy.”

— Jennifer McMahon

19. “Call me a skeptic, but I’ve always thought that it takes more than organic vegetables and talking circles to make an ideal society. Raven.”

— Jennifer McMahon

20. “For some people, Rose, it’s easier to pretend the things that frighten us most don’t exist at all.”

— Jennifer McMahon

21. “What if things happened to you – special, magic things – because you’d been preparing for them?”

— Jennifer McMahon

22. “Think of me,′ she said because it seemed like something a girl in a fairy tale might say. Think of me. Remember me. Love me. Turn me into a story you tell again and again. The sister who was good as gold and became a queen.”

— Jennifer McMahon

23. “Like all stories, it has pieces which are true, and pieces which are fiction. Nothing is ever really what it seems. Remember.”

— Jennifer McMahon

24. “Reggie’s earliest memory of her mother began with her mother balancing an egg on its end and ended with Reggie losing her left ear.”

— Jennifer McMahon

25. “You can sink a thing deep, weight it down with stones, but eventually, it will surface.”

— Jennifer McMahon

26. “Each photo is like a novel I can never open, Gary had explained once. I can hold it in my hand and only begin to imagine what’s inside – the lives these people might have led. Sometimes if there was a little clue on the photo – a name, date, or place – he’d try to research it...”

— Jennifer McMahon

27. “I watched in total disbelief as my aunt began to expertly roll a joint. “What are you doing?” “Baking a pie, Jax. What does it look like I’m doing?”

— Jennifer McMahon

28. “Tracer was a good guy, but Ruthie didn’t understand how one individual could smoke the amount of pot he did and still function.”

— Jennifer McMahon

29. “And, as in all fairy tales, there was bloodshed, there was loss.”

— Jennifer McMahon

30. “Reggie smiled. ‘You haven’t changed at all.’ Tara took another pile of clothing from her bag and gave Reggie a sly grin from over the top of it. ‘Do any of us really?”

— Jennifer McMahon

31. “How can you dream if you don’t have a soul?”

— Jennifer McMahon

32. “She was tough enough to chop a hole in the ice and swim in January, so it was hard to think of her being trapped by her own mind.”

— Jennifer McMahon

33. “Oh my God!” Sam said again, his voice shaking. I’ve given birth to something inhuman, Phoebe thought. A lamprey with row after row of teeth.”

— Jennifer McMahon

34. “And how that lady Suz was all wrong: art is not all about chaos, about taking things apart. True art, Emma will tell them, is about finding a way to make what’s broken whole.”

— Jennifer McMahon

35. “Fear does that to a person: shrinks them down, makes them small and weak.”

— Jennifer McMahon

36. “Grief is a monster.”

— Jennifer McMahon

37. “She places the orders for cases of frozen meat, huge cans of wax beans. She makes sure they stay.”

— Jennifer McMahon

38. “Young Reverend Ayers looks at a lake and sees only his own reflection in it; that is what God is to him. He does not see the creatures that live down deep, the dragonflies that hover, the frog on the lily pad.” Auntie’s face was full of pity and scorn as she shook her head and spat tobacco juice again. “His heart and mind are closed to the true beauty of the lake, the place where all its magic lies.”

— Jennifer McMahon

39. “But Tess always wondered – maybe people were better off with the watered-down version of life, life with blinders, filters, cars that ran and buildings that went up on time, simple, stupid, mindless jobs. Maybe they were happy.”

— Jennifer McMahon

40. “The truth was, he believed he was the luckiest man on earth to have these two for a wife and daughter – it was like getting to live with fairies or mermaids, some breathtakingly beautiful creatures he was not meant to understand fully.”

— Jennifer McMahon

41. “The covers are tented up over me and Mama’s heads, and it’s all dark, like we’re deep underground. Animals in a den. All warm and snuggly.”

— Jennifer McMahon

42. “How will we know if it’s changing us?” I asked. “Maybe we won’t. The biggest changes happen so slowly you hardly notice them.”

— Jennifer McMahon

43. “I thought bisexuality was another road toward freeing the mind. Letting go of preconceived notions of gender and identity. Balancing the male and the female, the yin and the yang. God, it was 1971. It was in back then.”

— Jennifer McMahon

44. “May 13 Deduction. Reduction. Redaction. How much has been redacted from the carefully curated version of our story?”

— Jennifer McMahon

45. “For everyone out there who has the good sense to be a little afraid when swimming in deep, dark water. You tell yourself there’s nothing down there, but there is. There always is.”

— Jennifer McMahon

46. “Katherine believed that when the work was going well things just fell into place, as if by magic. It was the artist’s job to open herself up, let herself be guided to whatever the next step might be.”

— Jennifer McMahon

47. “Mama and I are curled up, pressed against each other like twin commas.”

— Jennifer McMahon

48. “Lexie and I made little paper boats like that and sent them down the canal that flowed to the stream. She’d write messages inside them, hoping they would get carried far away, be picked up by a stranger who would read: I’m being held prisoner, send help, please! This is a note from the other side of the world. Everything is upside down here.”

— Jennifer McMahon

49. “Gary had grown up in a small town in Idaho and said it was kid heaven – there was room to breathe, to explore, you knew your neighbors, and your parents didn’t mind if you were out late because bad things never happened there. You were safe.”

— Jennifer McMahon

50. “You always say that death is not an ending, but a beginning. That the dead cross over to the world of the spirits and are surrounding us still.”

— Jennifer McMahon