Top 450 Jennifer Niven Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Here’s what I think: I think I’ve got a map in my car that wants to be used, and I think there are places we can go that need to be seen. Maybe no one else will ever visit them and appreciate them or take the time to think they’re important, but maybe even the smallest places mean something. And, if not, maybe they can mean something to us. At the very least, by the time we leave, we know we will have seen it. So come on. Let’s go. Let’s count for something.”

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

207. “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

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

— Jennifer Niven

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

213. “I shut down again. I went blank. One minute I was spinning, and the next minute my mind was dragging itself around in a circle, like an old arthritic dog trying to lie down. And then I just turned off and went to sleep, but not sleep in the way you do every night. Think a long, dark sleep where you don’t dream at all.”

— Jennifer Niven

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Jennifer Niven

224. “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

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

— Jennifer Niven

226. “There’s more to you than meets the eye.”

— Jennifer Niven

227. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I shout, “I would like to welcome you to my death!”

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

229. “On all sides of us, spread out below, are little white lights and black pockets of trees. Stars in the sky, stars on the ground. It’s hard to tell where the sky ends and the earth begins. I hate to admit it, but it’s beautiful.”

— Jennifer Niven

230. “But here’s the thing- even if there aren’t any aneurysms in there, these facts won’t change: I will still be someone who watches; I will still be someone who is prepared and on the lookout, because at any moment the earth could stop spinning. I’ve lived through the worst thing that can ever happen to me, and I know firsthand what the world can do.”

— Jennifer Niven

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

235. “I love the world that is my room.”

— Jennifer Niven

236. “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

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

— Jennifer Niven

238. “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

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

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

241. “All you have to do is today.”

— Jennifer Niven

242. “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

243. “If there’s one thing i know, it’s that no one can promise anything.”

— Jennifer Niven

244. “Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky.”

— Jennifer Niven

245. “But he’s kind of... extreme. Like he came to school one day painted head-to-toe red, and it wasn’t even Spirit Week. He told some people that he was protesting racism and others he was protesting the consumption of meat. Junior year he wore a cape every day for an entire month, cracked a chalkboard in half with a desk, and stole all the dissecting frogs from the science wing and gave them a funeral before burying them in the baseball field.”

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

247. “What if life could be this way? Only the happy parts, none of the terrible, not even the mildly unpleasant. What if we could just cut out the bad and keep the good? This is what I want to do with Violet – give her only the good, keep away the bad, so that good is all we ever have around us.”

— Jennifer Niven

248. “I don’t know what brings you up here, but to me the town looks prettier and the people look nicer and even the worst of them look almost kind.”

— Jennifer Niven

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

— Jennifer Niven

250. “If anyone can make it to another world, it’s Theodore Finch.”

— Jennifer Niven