Top 60 Joan Bauer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.”

— Joan Bauer

Featured in: Library Quotes

2. “The choices we make can have lasting consequences.”

— Joan Bauer

3. “When we don’t have the words chocolate can speak volumes.”

— Joan Bauer

Featured in: National Chocolate Day Quotes

4. “Almost. It’s a big word for me. I feel it everywhere. Almost home. Almost happy. Almost changed. Almost, but not quite. Not yet. Soon, maybe. I’m hoping hard for that.”

— Joan Bauer

5. “When you have something so important, something that you’ll stay awake for, something you know that you were designed to do, well, it’s worth getting a few dark circles, don’t you think?”

— Joan Bauer

6. “Words are such powerful things. We can rip somebody apart with them, we can write words down that can forever hurt another person. We can use them to tell stories and lies. We can misquote them and change what other people said to make ourselves look good...”

— Joan Bauer

7. “People are so cheap. Everyone wants quality, no one wants to pay for it. Here’s the suburban dream – to hire great workers who are such meek morons that they don’t have the guts to ask for a living wage.”

— Joan Bauer

8. “You don’t understand how much light you have until the lights go out.”

— Joan Bauer

9. “My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn’t have any excuse to be stupid.”

— Joan Bauer

10. “Sometimes you’ve got to shout the truth and wake people up.”

— Joan Bauer

11. “I’ll tell you something about tough times. They just about kill you, but if you decide to keep working at them, you’ll find your way through.”

— Joan Bauer

12. “Everyone needs fudge, Hildy. It’s how God helps us cope.”

— Joan Bauer

13. “New places always help us look at life differently.”

— Joan Bauer

14. “Staring down hard truth takes guts.”

— Joan Bauer

15. “My favorite star fact is: stars die but can keep on glowing. I like stubbornness in a star.”

— Joan Bauer

16. “Some things go too deep for words.”

— Joan Bauer

17. “Like my grandmother always said, ’you never know the blessings that come from suffering.”

— Joan Bauer

18. “You’ve got to love yourself with all your short comings, and you’ve got to love the world no matter how bad it gets.”

— Joan Bauer

19. “We are driving by the Gateway Arch – the tallest arch in the world. It’s made of stainless steel and manages to glisten even on a cloudy day. We’ve been to the top of it four times. Every time I see it, I remember the early pioneers who pushed west to see what was beyond Missouri. That’s what the arch is for – to help you think about courage. Those people had strong hearts and vision. My heart’s not strong, but my vision makes up for it.”

— Joan Bauer

20. “Mountains draw you to a deeper place in yourself.”

— Joan Bauer

21. “My father always told me that in this world we are going to make a truckload of mistakes, but the best mistake we can ever make is to err on the side of mercy.”

— Joan Bauer

22. “I hope you’ll have the kind of life where what you stand for is so important that it makes some people outright hostile. You won’t know how strong your beliefs really are until you have to defend them.”

— Joan Bauer

23. “You don’t need fancy things to feel good. You can hug a puppy. You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color. You can plant a flower and watch it grow. You can decide to trust people – the right people. You can decide to start over and let other people start over too” -Sugar Mae Cole.”

— Joan Bauer

24. “It takes a great cook to pull life truth from poultry.”

— Joan Bauer

25. “A heart will say amazing things if it’s given half a chance.”

— Joan Bauer

26. “Divorce casts so many shadows.”

— Joan Bauer

27. “And we learned that you don’t have to be famous or rich or physically healthy to be a leader. You just have to try to be a true person. We learned that helping other people brings out the good in everybody.”

— Joan Bauer

28. “You don’t know which way a thing will come at you, but you need to welcome it with your whole heart which ever way it arrives.”

— Joan Bauer

29. “Sometimes the best thing that can happen to a person is to have a puppy lick your face.”

— Joan Bauer

30. “Teenagers are like bees at night, I think. We don’t like waking up and we don’t always get with the program immediately, but once we figure out our mission, we’ll see it through.”

— Joan Bauer

31. “The sad heart needs work to do.”

— Joan Bauer

32. “I’ve got my Replogle globe, because you’ve got to keep a world view, you can’t just live like you’re the only person on the planet who matters.”

— Joan Bauer

33. “You cannot measure the loss of a human life. It’s all the things a person was, all their dreams, all the people who loved them, all they hoped to be and could give back to the world.”

— Joan Bauer

34. “Sometimes just getting up in the morning and standing at the gate can bring the gate down.”

— Joan Bauer

35. “Now I see that it isn’t the problems along the way that make us or break us. It’s how we learn to stand and face them that makes the difference.”

— Joan Bauer

36. “I don’t expect life to be easy. It hasn’t been yet and I’m not holding out for smooth sailing in the future. Not everyone likes this philosophy, but it makes sense to me because when life hits the skids, I don’t have to regroup as much as the people who walk around in a cloud like the world owes them a joyful existence.”

— Joan Bauer

37. “He stood up, put the tree back under the grow light. ‘There. That’s what’s going to happen to us. It’s called grafting. Taking something from one place and fixing it to another until they grow together. We didn’t start from the same tree, but we’re going to grow together like we did.”

— Joan Bauer

38. “Have you ever noticed that it takes a textbook dozens of pages to say what normal people can cover fast? Example: What was the full impact of World War II? Clear-cut teenage answer: we won.”

— Joan Bauer

39. “When you can carry five full dinner platters on your left arm, you should be able to vote, even if you’re not eighteen.”

— Joan Bauer

40. “Infatuation cannot be sustained indefinitely, my friend. Love that embraces the entire person is a monumental gift that takes time to grow.”

— Joan Bauer

41. “It was probably easier in the old days when the bad guys rode into town wearing black capes or whatever bad guys wore and the milk cows were ownded by honest people. Right off the bat, you’d know who you were dealing with. Now everybody dresses alike.”

— Joan Bauer

42. “If you can’t find an answer at the mall or the library, what does that say about the world?”

— Joan Bauer

43. “The problem with the heart is how it can have so many opposite feelings coursing through it all at the same time. It’s really an inconsistent thing- appreciating something one minute and hating it the next.”

— Joan Bauer

44. “If you worry about every little thing you’re going to have one thoroughly miserable life.”

— Joan Bauer

45. “Librarians understand about power – they know how to find anything.”

— Joan Bauer

46. “You’re going to fall down in this life – everybody dies. But you be the kind of person who doesn’t stay down for long. Get back on your feet and keep going no matter what.”

— Joan Bauer

47. “You got to laugh Tree, if you don’t you’ll cry.”

— Joan Bauer

48. “Sometimes it takes a lot of courage to be who you are.”

— Joan Bauer

49. “It was February sixth: eight days until Valentine’s Day. I was dateless, as usual, deep in the vice grip of unrequited love. It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year’s Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids in their windows by January second to rub it in.”

— Joan Bauer

50. “How could a man with so much heart die from a heart attack?”

— Joan Bauer