Top 450 Jennifer Niven Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “This is followed by laughter because we’re in high school, which means we’re predictable and almost everything is funny, especially if it’s someone else’s public humiliation.”

— Jennifer Niven

202. “It’s hard to describe, but I imagine the way I am at this moment is a lot like getting sucked into a vortex. Everything dark and churning, but slow churning instead of fast, and this great weight pulling you down, like it’s attached to your feet even if you can’t see it. I think, This is what it must be feel like to be trapped in quicksand.”

— Jennifer Niven

203. “Loss does that, hits you out of the blue. You can be in the car or in class or at the movies, laughing and having a good time, and suddenly it’s as if someone has reached directly into the wound and squeezed with all their might.”

— Jennifer Niven

204. “Your identifier is you. I remember your eyes. Your mouth. The freckles on both cheeks that look like constellations. I know your smiles, at least three of them, and at least eight of your expressions, including the ones you only do with your eyes. If I could draw, I would draw you, and I wouldn’t need to look at you to do it. Because your face is stuck in my mind.”

— Jennifer Niven

205. “She is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. The same elements that are inside the rest of us, but I can’t help thinking she’s more that that and she’s got other elements going on that on one’s ever heard of, ones that make her stand apart from everybody else.”

— Jennifer Niven

206. “I walk through the black Indiana night, under a ceiling of stars, and think about the phrase “elegance and euphoria,” and how it describes exactly what I feel with Violet.”

— Jennifer Niven

207. “I’m always amazed by people and their sleep. I wouldn’t ever sleep if I didn’t have to.”

— Jennifer Niven

208. “You’re so worried that you can’t ever be close to anyone, but it’s not the face blindness that’s to blame; it’s you. All the smiling and the faking and pretending to be what you think people want you to be. That’s what keeps you isolated. That’s what screws you up. You need to try being a real person.”

— Jennifer Niven

209. “I run until time stops. Until my mind stops.”

— Jennifer Niven

210. “You’re no hero. You’re a coward. You only saved them from yourself.”

— Jennifer Niven

211. “No one can lock you back in, Libby. You choose whether you let them.”

— Jennifer Niven

212. “Because after suffering a loss, you become a ghost in your own body. You observe yourself doing things and saying things that you might not normally do or say. You need something to ground you and prove to you that you’re still here. As a way of feeling something. Anything.”

— Jennifer Niven

213. “Which of my feelings are real? Which of the mes is me?”

— Jennifer Niven

214. “We do not remember days, we remember moments.”

— Jennifer Niven

215. “Theodore Finch, April 3. “Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away!”

— Jennifer Niven

216. “Because we all have to die someday. I just want to be prepared.”

— Jennifer Niven

217. “Stars in the sky, stars on the ground. It’s hard to tell where the sky ends and the earth begins. I feel the need to say something grand and poetic, but the only thing I come up with is “It’s lovely.”

— Jennifer Niven

218. “I love the thrill of impending, weightless doom, so I built something to give me those feelings all the time... I like the idea of something that can give you those feelings all the time. I want something like that, and then I look at Violet and think: There she is.”

— Jennifer Niven

219. “Not to mention if I don’t pay attention and you decide to go back up there and jump off, I’m looking at a lawsuit, and on the salary they pay me, believe me when I say I do not have the money to be sued.”

— Jennifer Niven

220. “I can already feel myself falling hard, something I’ve been known to do. All because she smiled at me.”

— Jennifer Niven

221. “I don’t want to hear about the cardinal again. Because the thing of it is, that cardinal was dead either way, whether he came inside or not. Maybe he knew it, and maybe that’s why he decided to crash into the glass a little harder than normal that day. He would have died in here, only slower, because that’s what happens when you’re a Finch. The marriage dies. The love dies. The people fade away. I.”

— Jennifer Niven

222. “I learned that there is good in this world, if you look hard enough for it. I learned that not everyone is disappointing, including me, and that a 1,257-foot bump in the ground can feel higher than a bell tower if you’re standing next to the right person.”

— Jennifer Niven

223. “Too many people in this world think small is the best they can do. Not you, Libby Strout. You weren’t born for small! You don’t know how to do small! Small is not in you!”

— Jennifer Niven

224. “Because I’m sitting next to you on this swing and you’re beautiful.”

— Jennifer Niven

225. “Jessamyn West said, ‘Writing is so difficult that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.”

— Jennifer Niven

226. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to run into someone angrier than you.”

— Jennifer Niven

227. “I feel homesick for this London I left behind.”

— Jennifer Niven

228. “Just like I will decide my life. No more waiting for other people to decide things for me. I’m writing it right now.”

— Jennifer Niven

229. “You have to live your life like you’ll never be sorry.”

— Jennifer Niven

230. “There aren’t many people who would say this about me, but the great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.”

— Jennifer Niven

231. “There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. None of us knows how long we have, maybe another month, maybe another fifty years -I like living as if I only have two days.”

— Jennifer Niven

232. “I wanted to write something tough, hard, sad, but funny.”

— Jennifer Niven

233. “My mom used to say sometimes it’s actually about the other person and you just happen to be there. Like sometimes the other person needs to learn a lesson or go through an experience, good or bad, and you’re just and accessory in some way, like a supporting actor in whatever their scene happens to be.”

— Jennifer Niven

234. “As he talks, I lie back against the ground, the blanket wrapped around me, and say to the sky, “May your eye go to the Sun, To the wind your soul, You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.”

— Jennifer Niven

235. “I am broken and no one can fix it.”

— Jennifer Niven

236. “I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood... In and out, we are swept;... we can not step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls.”

— Jennifer Niven

237. “You are driving me crazy. You have been driving me crazy for weeks.”

— Jennifer Niven

238. “There is only now,’ he says, ’and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion.”

— Jennifer Niven

239. “Last night is like a puzzle – only not put together: all the pieces are scattered everywhere and some are missing. I wish my heart wouldn’t beat so fast.”

— Jennifer Niven

240. “Yesterday at this time, I didn’t even know her.”

— Jennifer Niven

241. “Even when we weren’t wandering, even from the floor of your closet, you showed the world to me.”

— Jennifer Niven

242. “By the time I started eating- really eating- the loss was already so big it felt like I was carrying around the world. So carrying around the weight wasn’t any heavier. It was trying to carry around both that got to be too much. Which is why sometimes you have to set some of it down. You can’t carry all of it forever.”

— Jennifer Niven

243. “What would I have said to him if I’d known I would never see him again?”

— Jennifer Niven

244. “I meant what I said to Embryo about drugs. We don’t mix. What it comes down to for me is I have a hard enough time keeping control over my brain without something else getting in the way.”

— Jennifer Niven

245. “Overdrive for a girl I barely know, all because she’s the first person I’ve met who seems to speak my language. A few words of it anyway.”

— Jennifer Niven

246. “Guys like Ryan Cross have a way of reminding you who you are, even when you don’t want to remember.”

— Jennifer Niven

247. “The thing is, there are good days and bad days. I feel almost guilty saying they aren’t all bad. Something catches me off guard – a TV show, a funny one-liner from my dad, a comment in class – and I laugh like nothing ever happened.”

— Jennifer Niven

248. “Be the person I’m meant to be and have that be enough.”

— Jennifer Niven

249. “Growing fourteen inches in a summer is easy. It’s growing out of a label that’s hard.”

— Jennifer Niven

250. “All you have to do is today.”

— Jennifer Niven