Top 90 Jessica Knoll Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Men who call women crazy are always the men who have first pushed them to the brink.”

— Jessica Knoll

2. “My anger is carbon monoxide, binding to pain, humiliation, and hurt, rendering them powerless. You would never know when you met me how angry I am. Like Ani, I sometimes feel like a wind-up doll. Turn my key and I will tell you what you want to hear. I will smile on cue. My anger is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. It’s completely toxic.”

— Jessica Knoll

3. “Taste, I had yet to learn, was the delicate balance between expensive and unassuming.”

— Jessica Knoll

4. “But faith doesn’t mean that to me anymore. Now it means someone seeing something in you that you don’t, and not giving up until you see it too.”

— Jessica Knoll

5. “I’ve tried to make sense of how someone who didn’t stalk his victims in advance ended up going after the best and the brightest. And I think that’s it, the thing they all had in common – a light that outshone his. He targets college campuses and sorority houses because he’s looking for the cream of the crop. He wants to extinguish us – we are the ones who remind him that he’s not that smart, not that good-looking, and there’s nothing particularly special about him.”

— Jessica Knoll

6. “It was one of those awful moments where you have no control over your reaction, when the pain is too exposed to hide.”

— Jessica Knoll

7. “I should do three things every day, but instead I sit, paralyzed in front of my computer, beating myself up for not doing three things every day like I promised myself I would. I’ve determined this is more time-consuming and stressful than actually doing the three goddamn things a day, and, therefore, I’m entitled to my fury.”

— Jessica Knoll

8. “I thought that by twenty-eight I could stop trying to prove myself and relax already. But this fight just gets bloodier with age.”

— Jessica Knoll

9. “We were broke, Mom signing up for new credit cards every other month to finance her Bloomingdale’s excursions, while the shoddy Sheetrock walls of our dramatic McMansion went rank with mildew we couldn’t “afford” to have removed.”

— Jessica Knoll

10. “It’s a certain kind of hell, confessing your most humiliating sexual secrets to a room full of hairy middle-aged men.”

— Jessica Knoll

11. “I feel anger and hatred and frustration and sadness like they’re physical fabrics. This one’s silk, this one’s velvet, this one’s crisp cotton. But I couldn’t tell you what the texture of loving Luke is anymore.”

— Jessica Knoll

12. “I wrapped myself in the flimsy hospital gown and tiptoed across the hospital room to sit down on the hospital bed, holding my arms across my chest, trying to contain my breasts. They seemed enormous and unpredictable without a bra.”

— Jessica Knoll

13. “In a clear voice, Mrs. Ross said, “This may be where we mark Liam’s time with us, but I don’t want you to think this is where you have to come to think about Liam.” She held the vase close to her chest. “Think about him always.” Her mouth puckered. “Anywhere.”

— Jessica Knoll

14. “The last thing the world needs is one more woman with principles. What we need is women with money. Women with money have flexibility, and nothing is more dangerous than a woman who can bend any way she wants.”

— Jessica Knoll

15. “Hot pink, I’m sure she spent a few minutes debating it – was she tan enough, maybe the navy silky sleeveless top instead, can’t go wrong with navy – and over her shoulder, a cognac Prada the exact same shade as her shoes, the perfect match more age revealing than the skin starting to pucker in her neck. She had at least ten years on me, I determined, relieved.”

— Jessica Knoll

16. “All my life, I’ve found it difficult to advocate for myself, to ask for what I want. I fear burdening people so much.”

— Jessica Knoll

17. “Education, travel, culture – this is what any pennies pinched should be used for, never flashy cars, loud logos, or personal maintenance.”

— Jessica Knoll

18. “That would be the most surprising lesson I’d learn at Bradley: You only scream when you’re finally safe.”

— Jessica Knoll

19. “Arthur sighed heavily, like he was sorry he ever brought it up, but I knew he wasn’t. The more sacred a piece of information, the more desperate the gatekeeper is to reveal it, the harder you have to work to relieve her of the burden. That way she doesn’t feel horribly guilty about betraying confidences – what could she do? She was browbeaten into it!”

— Jessica Knoll

20. “My favorite strategy is to feign inferiority and encourage my enemy’s arrogance.”

— Jessica Knoll

21. “The attack wasn’t just about getting back at his tormentors, or about revenge, it was about his contempt.”

— Jessica Knoll

22. “Bickering. It’s so much uglier than a heated, dish-smashing fight, isn’t it?”

— Jessica Knoll

23. “God has a plan for all of us and he knows the outcome before we’re even born.”

— Jessica Knoll

24. “First semester, I learned that Jack Rogers sandals, so revered in college, screamed, “My small liberal arts school will always be the center of the universe!” I’d found a new axis, so into the trash went my gold, silver, and white pairs.”

— Jessica Knoll

25. “It is a dangerous thing to conflate feminism with liking all women. It limits women to being one thing, likable, when feminism is about allowing women to be all shades of all things, even if that thing is a snake oil saleswoman.”

— Jessica Knoll

26. “Thank you for encouraging my imagination endlessly, for investing in my education and prioritizing it the way you did, even when it meant making sacrifices in your own life. Thank you for showing me through your own example of hard work and dedication what it means to be ambitious and to have a strong work ethic. I am truly the luckiest girl alive to have you two as parents. I would not be where I am without you.”

— Jessica Knoll

27. “There are times I’m on the subway and it’s so packed I can’t escape the legs on my left and right. New Yorkers rage about this forced physical contact, but I secretly savor it, so soothed by the heat generated between bodies I could fall asleep on the shoulder of a stranger.”

— Jessica Knoll

28. “The meta-moment of experiencing how the rest of the world sees you, because the salty girl is you.”

— Jessica Knoll

29. “Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.”

— Jessica Knoll

30. “Sometimes I feel like a windup doll, like I have to reach behind and turn my golden key to produce a greeting, a laugh, whatever the socially acceptable reaction should be.”

— Jessica Knoll

31. “Women’s Magazine, “A study found that the act of physically closing your menu once you’ve decided what to order can make you feel more satisfied with your choice.”

— Jessica Knoll

32. “It was a hard thing to do, apologize, but I’ve done harder things.”

— Jessica Knoll

33. “You’re showing young girls that you don’t have to be thin to be beautiful, many a freshly body positive women’s mag editor has started off an interview with me, causing my pelvic floor to seize up in a fit of fury. No, I correct them, I’m showing young girls that you don’t have to be beautiful to matter.”

— Jessica Knoll

34. “I’m a cold person... I’m selfish... I’m only capable of feeling about things that benefit me.”

— Jessica Knoll

35. “You only scream when you’re finally safe.”

— Jessica Knoll

36. “Her smile revealed a row of coffee-drinker teeth behind a coat of Chanel lipstick.”

— Jessica Knoll

37. “You might think someone like Hallsy would only be inclined to torture someone like me, but if she did that, it would be an admission of her own aesthetic shortcomings. As long as I deferred to her, it was in her best interest to embrace me. It sent the message that there was no need to be jealous or intimidated – she was every bit as desirable as an overaerobicized twenty-something.”

— Jessica Knoll

38. “The Philadelphia Inquirer, would I? “Let’s not delay the inevitable.” Dan put his hand on my shoulder, and I stared at the floor, at his shoes made of such bad fake leather they looked rubber. “You did good in there,” Dan said. “Vencino is a bully. He’s just trying to get under your skin. But you didn’t rise to the occasion. That was good.” “But they think I planned this with Arthur or something,” I said. “How could they think that?” “They don’t,” Dan said. “Like your.”

— Jessica Knoll

39. “Friday was the day we filmed in the studio, a cavernous room above a Starbucks in Media, PA. The whole place smelled like the burnt, overpriced fuel of diabetic Americans.”

— Jessica Knoll

40. “Hemingway used to write an ending to his novel only to delete it, asserting that it made the story stronger because the reader would always be able to intuit the ghost of that final, incorporeal passage.”

— Jessica Knoll

41. “I think you know when two people are meant for each other when you see that they’re better people together than they are when they’re apart.”

— Jessica Knoll

42. “Now it means someone seeing something in you that you don’t, and not giving up until you see it too. I want that. I miss that.”

— Jessica Knoll

43. “I saw how there was a protection in success, and success was defined by threatening the minion on the other end of a cell phone, expensive pumps terrorizing the city, people stepping out of your way simply because you looked like you had more important places to be than they did. Somewhere along the way, a man got tangled up in this definition too. I just had to get to that, I decided, and no one could hurt me again.”

— Jessica Knoll

44. “Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do and it’s a messy one at that.”

— Jessica Knoll

45. “There is something about seeing someone from behind, something about the way people walk away, that I’ve always found unnervingly intimate. Maybe it’s because the back of the body isn’t on guard the way the front is – the slouch of the shoulders and the flex in the back muscles, that’s the most honest you’ll ever see a person.”

— Jessica Knoll

46. “I told Luke about that night at a time when he was enamored with me, which is the only time you should ever tell anyone something shameful about yourself – when a person is mad enough about you that disgrace is endearing.”

— Jessica Knoll

47. “It’s okay to be insufferable as long as you’re aware that you’re being insufferable.”

— Jessica Knoll

48. “There’s only so much lying around on a beach you can do before you lose it.”

— Jessica Knoll

49. “I’d read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. My favorite strategy is to feign inferiority and encourage my enemy’s arrogance.”

— Jessica Knoll

50. “Healthy people are people who feel connected to their communities, who are loved and supported by those around them, and who have a sense of purpose in their lives. Healthy women do not waste their precious energy separating egg whites from egg yolks.”

— Jessica Knoll