Top 40 Jess Lourey Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Every woman should have pearls,” Mom said, “to remind ourselves that grit under pressure becomes beauty.”

— Jess Lourey

2. “The trick of life,” she said, “is that you can’t hold the pain for too long. The magic, either.”

— Jess Lourey

3. “There’s about a hundred shades of green in a Minnesota summer, light like celery, deep like emeralds. You wouldn’t think one color could have so many different flavors.”

— Jess Lourey

4. “He watched a lot of TV. I guess many people did. Maybe like him, they preferred their lives delivered to them in a box.”

— Jess Lourey

5. “He wore his anger like knives, and you didn’t want them aimed at you.”

— Jess Lourey

6. “It’s only possible to provide help when it’s asked for. The rest of the time, all you can give is love.”

— Jess Lourey

7. “I heard the distaste in her voice, the disdain for people who lived in trailers. She wouldn’t say it out loud, but there it was. I wanted to ask her what she thought of people who lived in houses with scary drunks, but I didn’t. Those sorts of questions only made her angry.”

— Jess Lourey

8. “I’d been thirteen, not stupid, though a lot of people confuse the two.”

— Jess Lourey

9. “He said the government was always listening and that anything you had to say you should say in person.”

— Jess Lourey

10. “My eyes were scratchy with middle-sleep.”

— Jess Lourey

11. “As far as she could tell, men didn’t have close friendships, not like women did, but they still had that human need for connection. Every movie and TV show and magazine article told them it was their job to go out and grab what they wanted at the same time it told them that women were theirs for the taking.”

— Jess Lourey

12. “You’ll recognize those men, the ones inclined to their dark side, because they’ll expect you to carry their load. They’ll smother your anger with their pain, they’ll make you doubt yourself, and they’ll tell you they love you the whole time. Some do it big, like Ed, but most do it in quiet steps, like your father.”

— Jess Lourey

13. “In our neighborhood, the problem wasn’t the person who made the mistake; it was the person who acknowledged the truth.”

— Jess Lourey

14. “They weren’t misguided, these men who couldn’t take a hint, who kept at a woman who was clearly uninterested. They were broken. Few of them would go so far as kidnapping, sure, but every one of them was after someone they could make feel less than, someone they imagined was beneath them, and they believed every woman was beneath them.”

— Jess Lourey

15. “I’m having a birthday party. Do you want to come?” Evie glanced at the invitation. “Thanks, but no.” She didn’t use any excuses, just said it simple and straight, handing my humiliation right back to me, thanks but no thanks.”

— Jess Lourey

16. “Remember the good, only the good. Don’t borrow trouble from the past.”

— Jess Lourey

17. “I let the fireflies lead the way, dancing just ahead of me, sparkling as I passed and then dimming to nothing.”

— Jess Lourey

18. “Their family and friends are the only ones who can understand the depths of their grief, the life’s work of creating meaning in loss, of having their world shaped by violence they couldn’t see coming and did not deserve.”

— Jess Lourey

19. “There’s also the truth that 70 percent of serial killer victims are female. You better believe that knowing you’re prey heightens your interest in the predator. You find yourself desperate to make sense of largely random acts of serial murder, believing that if you can understand motivation and hunting patterns, you can protect yourself.”

— Jess Lourey

20. “In some versions of the story, the boy had been tortured, made to drink the blood of his captors, and forced to walk home naked. Except no one seemed to have a name to go with their stories. Who had been attacked?”

— Jess Lourey

21. “His accent was coarse, pure backcountry Minnesotan. If he had to string together more than five words, we’d hear the “I seen it” and “can you borrow me some” that my parents said were the signs of ignorance.”

— Jess Lourey

22. “The applause felt like it was injected straight into my veins.”

— Jess Lourey

23. “Small-town kids are pebbles in a river, pushed around by the flow, forming pockets and piles, reforming when the current picks up and we find ourselves in a whole new cluster.”

— Jess Lourey

24. “She stared up at him, at this man-she-knew-who-was-a-stranger, this person who’d risked everything in his world to kidnap another human so he could thrust away like a zoo monkey whenever he wanted. This loser had made a biological act so imperative that he was willing to go to prison to feel the same relief he could get with his own hand.”

— Jess Lourey

25. “I stared across the crackling fire at Brenda, the glow lighting up her heart-shaped face. My love for her was carved into my bones.”

— Jess Lourey

26. “A man is responsible for his own actions. Not the actions of others.”

— Jess Lourey

27. “Men in packs can do terrible things, things they wouldn’t have the hate to do alone. It’s no excuse, just something you should know.”

— Jess Lourey

28. “If you divorced him, we’d have more money. He doesn’t hardly sell any sculptures. He eats and drinks a lot. Mostly you pay the bills.”

— Jess Lourey

29. “That terrible awareness that life could twist on you in a blink wasn’t something a person could forget.”

— Jess Lourey

30. “Every waitress had a group of guys who mistook professional courtesy for a personal relationship. She’d never liked it, but she’d thought she understood it. As far as she could tell, men didn’t have close friendships, not like women did, but they still had that human need for connection. Every movie and TV show and magazine article told them it was their job to go out and grab what they wanted at the same time it told them that women were theirs for the taking.”

— Jess Lourey

31. “Maureen was more alive than any of us. She protected kids from bullies. When men catcalled her, she’d catcall back. She’d demanded we pierce her ears first because she was Maureen.”

— Jess Lourey

32. “It felt like ink and stars and magic, and I never wanted it to end.”

— Jess Lourey

33. “Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree.” I hated that phrase. It was code for, “I know you’re too obtuse to ever see how I right I am, so to get any satisfaction out of this discussion, I’m going to pretend to be more reasonable than you. Oh, and get the last word in.”

— Jess Lourey

34. “Belief is a powerful lens; it can shape the world world to it.”

— Jess Lourey

35. “All this time I’d thought of Aunt Jin as a hero. Well, here’s something you should know: heroes are willing to pause their own lives to help you. Jin wasn’t that. She was a regular person.”

— Jess Lourey

36. “I did. Some truths feel like they’ll kill you if you say them out loud.”

— Jess Lourey

37. “I enjoyed my own company enough that I didn’t feel the need to socialize with people who exhausted me.”

— Jess Lourey

38. “A hole that probably hid prehistoric water monsters, slithering, sharp-toothed creatures that needed immense depths to survive but that sometimes, only every few years or so, would unfurl a tentacle and wrap it around your ankle and suck you down down down.”

— Jess Lourey

39. “With Mom, what went up must come down, and it was a mystery what exact combination would make life too much for her.”

— Jess Lourey

40. “While their beneficence ensured no one they approved of ever went hungry, sick or homeless in Lilydale, they also used their influence to control the local population, harass those who stepped out of line and create a culture of fear that had neighbors telling on neighbors.”

— Jess Lourey

41. “She’d cracked like a mirror after, and her pieces were so sharp, none of us could get close enough to put her back together again.”

— Jess Lourey

42. “Women always try, but men like that are born bad.”

— Jess Lourey

43. “I hadn’t meant to tell her the last bit. Sometimes Mom was fine taking in that much information. But then there were the other times. I could see her tumblers working. Her face had gone slack. The back of my neck grew cold waiting to see which version was going to erupt. But finally, happily, the correct words dropped into place, and out rolled a perfectly normal sentence. “Wonderful! Your dad and I will come see you girls play.” Did she know she was lying?”

— Jess Lourey

44. “Don’t you see?” she continued. “We shouldn’t do anything for the dead. We have only one job on this earth, and it has to do with the living: we must love those put in our path as hard as we can, every day.”

— Jess Lourey

45. “Her raw fear, and even more so how desperately she was working to hide it, made me want to weep.”

— Jess Lourey

46. “Evie had swallowed that like it belonged to her and went right back to whatever she was working on. Then, later that day, I was walking behind her as she told a fifth grader in outdated bell-bottoms that he wore them with “a flair and a flourish” all his own. I liked that a whole lot about Evie, how she passed on her treasures.”

— Jess Lourey

47. “Was it contagious, the emptiness I felt? Was he worried he’d catch it?”

— Jess Lourey

48. “I knew him from one of my dad’s parties, knew him better than I wanted to.”

— Jess Lourey