Top 60 John Corey Whaley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Some people say dying alone is a fate worse than death itself. Well, they should try being alone during the living part sometimes. There’s no quicker way to make you wonder why the hell you ever thought you’d want to return.”

— John Corey Whaley

2. “Not only had my brother disappeared, but – and bear with me here – a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.”

— John Corey Whaley

3. “We’re just floating in space trying to figure out what it means to be human.”

— John Corey Whaley

4. “I can’t seem to be a pessimist long enough to overlook the possibility of things being overwhelmingly good.”

— John Corey Whaley

5. “No matter how often you see or talk to someone, no matter how much you know them or don’t know them, you always fill up some space in their lives that can’t ever be replaced the right way again once you leave it.”

— John Corey Whaley

6. “But in that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if you’re thinking of something good or bad, it always leaves you a little emptier afterward.”

— John Corey Whaley

7. “Life, he says, doesn’t have to be so bad all the time. We don’t have to be anxious about everything. We can just be. We can get up, anticipate that the day will probably have a few good moments and a few bad ones, and then just deal with it. Take it all in and deal as best we can.”

— John Corey Whaley

8. “Maybe we all just exist, all versions of us exist at times, and we have to figure out a way to get to each of them, to find each one and tell that version that it’s okay, that it’s all justthe way it works, a concept too powerful to ignore but too complicated to explain.”

— John Corey Whaley

9. “Secrets, he said, will boil under your skin until it feels like every time you speak, every time you look in the mirror, every time you hug someone or kiss someone or tell someone you love them, it feels like you’re going to die.”

— John Corey Whaley

10. “That’s what we do sometimes. We let people disappear. We want them to. If everyone just stays quiet and out of the way, then the rest of us can pretend everything’s fine. But everything is not fine.”

— John Corey Whaley

11. “No matter how evil man gets, he always gets a second chance one way or another.”

— John Corey Whaley

12. “She believed in herself maybe more than other people believed in God or the devil or Heaven or Hell.”

— John Corey Whaley

13. “He was afraid of the world, afraid it would find a way to swallow him up. But, maybe everyone was sometimes. Maybe some people can just turn it off when they need to. After.”

— John Corey Whaley

14. “The thing to know about my brother was that even though he was fifteen, he looked to be about the same age as me. Only, I’m not sure if that was because he looked older or I looked younger. I like to think it was a healthy mixture of both.”

— John Corey Whaley

15. “He was an astronaut without a suit, but he was still breathing.”

— John Corey Whaley

16. “Your mind has a way of not letting you forget things you wish you could. Especially with people. Like, you’ll always try your best to forget things that people say to you or about you, but you always remember. And you’ll try to forget things you’ve seen that no one should see, but you just can’t do it. And when you try to forget someone’s face, you can’t get it out of your head.”

— John Corey Whaley

17. “When I asked him the meaning of life, Dr. Webb got very quiet and then told me that life has no one meaning, it only has whatever meaning each of us puts on our own life.”

— John Corey Whaley

18. “You’re like Lady Macbeth without the murder.” “Thank you. You have no idea how much of a compliment that is to me.”

— John Corey Whaley

19. “I thought maybe a day was coming when I’d stop constantly worrying about how to live. Maybe at some point I’d just start living, no questions asked.”

— John Corey Whaley

20. “Crazy people don’t know they’re crazy.”

— John Corey Whaley

21. “What he feared the most was that all this hiding had made it impossible for him to ever be found again.”

— John Corey Whaley

22. “Death can surprise us. It can scare us. It can keep us up at night. But we’ve also learned the things that death cannot do. It cannot crush our hopes. It cannot take away the love and support of our friends and family.”

— John Corey Whaley

23. “You can find ways to be okay with dying, but you can’t fake your way through living.”

— John Corey Whaley

24. “He looks back down to find that his brother is no longer there. He is no longer there to stop him from ridiculing Merle Hodge or making some smart-ass remark about woodpeckers. He doesn’t stop him when he thinks about asking the tour guide an unanswerable question or when he considers pretending to see a large bird off in the distance. He isn’t there anymore to supply Cullen Witter with endless chances to do better.”

— John Corey Whaley

25. “I often found myself in situations where I had, without thinking, said too much to too many with too little caution.”

— John Corey Whaley

26. “Cabot Searcy began to care about learning not for the sake of making good grades, but because he still wanted to change the world.”

— John Corey Whaley

27. “He was afraid of the world, afraid it would find a way to swallow him up. But, maybe everyone was sometimes.”

— John Corey Whaley

28. “And, long after Clark had gone home, Solomon stayed up wondering if everyone falls in love with someone who can’t love them back.”

— John Corey Whaley

29. “I’m sorry, Cullen. I really am. I know this sucks. But you’re better off anyway. And you’ll be fine. You needed me. Now someone else needs me.”

— John Corey Whaley

30. “You ever feel like you know someone so much that they can breathe for you? Like when their chest and your chest rise and fall, they do it together because they have to? That’s how it felt. That’s how it always felt.”

— John Corey Whaley

31. “They say using your imagination makes you live longer.”

— John Corey Whaley

32. “But, you see, it is not so much in the things we say to them about Christ, but more in the things we do for them that mirror the ways of Christ.”

— John Corey Whaley

33. “Everyone just outgrew me. Now I think I’m just haunting them.”

— John Corey Whaley

34. “He hasn’t left his house in three years, he’s not crazy, he’s a genius; just tv and videogames twenty four-seven, I think he’s my new hero...”

— John Corey Whaley

35. “I jotted down Oslo After Death. This would be a great title for a book, I thought. That is what I do sometimes. I jot down titles for books that I one day intend to write.”

— John Corey Whaley

36. “It was like looking at the sun and not going blind.”

— John Corey Whaley

37. “I don’t want to lie about who I am, even if it doesn’t matter. It’s who I am. It’s part of me.”

— John Corey Whaley

38. “He tried to help the world, but the world wouldn’t let him.”

— John Corey Whaley

39. “I guess the most interesting thing about Gabriel was that he didn’t seem to care at all what people were thinking about him. He walked down the hallway at school with his head down not because he wanted to avoid being seen or dissuade social predators or anything, but simply because he didn’t see any reason to lift up his head.”

— John Corey Whaley

40. “The gays love me. I think it’s the accent.”

— John Corey Whaley

41. “The unspoken philosophy of all those in love with Ada was something like this: If I have to die to get that, then death it is.”

— John Corey Whaley

42. “Now, no matter what they told themselves or each other, it would always be different. After all, no first love goes away overnight, especially one that’s always right in front of you, but just out of your reach.”

— John Corey Whaley

43. “You have to forget about people when you can’t have them anymore. That’s the only way to be okay.”

— John Corey Whaley

44. “People dreamed. People left. And they all came back.”

— John Corey Whaley

45. “I feel like writing is sometimes the only way I understand anything.”

— John Corey Whaley

46. “Some people sign on for the impossible. And they’re the ones everybody remembers.”

— John Corey Whaley

47. “She knew it was weird that she’d reached out to him the way she had. But she also knew that there were a lot of people in the world who regretted never doing the things they felt were right because they were afraid of seeming strange or crazy. Lisa wouldn’t settle for that sort of mediocre existence, one bound by invisible social cues. And she had a good feeling that someone like Solomon Reed would appreciate that.”

— John Corey Whaley

48. “And then he spent three years wondering why everyone found that so hard to understand. All he was doing was living instead of dying. Some people get cancer. Some people get crazy. Nobody tries to take the chemo away.”

— John Corey Whaley

49. “You have to forget about people when you can’t have them anymore.”

— John Corey Whaley

50. “But I know what it’s like to constantly think about a life you aren’t living.”

— John Corey Whaley