Top 40 Katie Cotugno Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I was trying not to lose you. But I lost you anyway.”

— Katie Cotugno

2. “I think of how it felt to lose him, slow and painful and confusing, and how it felt to wonder if I’d ever really had him at all.”

— Katie Cotugno

3. “Petrichor is the word for the scent of rain as it hits the blacktop.”

— Katie Cotugno

4. “Hey, stranger,” he says as I climb into the passenger seat, in a voice like I’m not one at all.”

— Katie Cotugno

5. “She didn’t understand how other people did it, how they just strolled right up to strangers and started conversations – how they made themselves into people strangers would ever want to meet. She wasn’t shy, not exactly. She was afraid.”

— Katie Cotugno

6. “So, like, nobody can pull the rug out from under you if you decide there’s no rug to begin with?”

— Katie Cotugno

7. “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”

— Katie Cotugno

8. “I’m so hugely tired of carrying all of this inside me, all my guilt and anger and loneliness.”

— Katie Cotugno

9. “In the morning, I wake up and find a pomegranate on my doorstep: red and perfect, round as the world itself.”

— Katie Cotugno

10. “A future as lonely as the surface of the moon and still just the sight of him feels like a homecoming, like a song I used to know but forgot.”

— Katie Cotugno

11. “There’s no limit to the ways that we have managed to fail each other as best friends.”

— Katie Cotugno

12. “You looked like freakin’ AOC up there.”

— Katie Cotugno

13. “Jealousy made you vulnerable. Meanness just made you an ice queen.”

— Katie Cotugno

14. “Why are you going to let people who are hell-bent on not forgiving you keep you from something that could actually be great?”

— Katie Cotugno

15. “I don’t actually think it always has to be your sole responsibility to make sure everything goes perfectly all the time.”

— Katie Cotugno

16. “It rained a couple of hours ago – it rains every single day, world without end –.”

— Katie Cotugno

17. “You should never have to be afraid to be who you really are.”

— Katie Cotugno

18. “Nothing about you, my dear, has ever been lost on me.”

— Katie Cotugno

19. “God, the only thing worse than having a panic attack was trying to have one in secret while someone else was watching.”

— Katie Cotugno

20. “Jesus Christ on a cracker.”

— Katie Cotugno

21. “If you liked being alone all the time, that would be one thing. But I don’t actually think you do. I think you’re just letting yourself be scared.”

— Katie Cotugno

22. “I imagine him grown up and finished with med school, patients lying on the operating table – reaching inside people’s rib cages, fixing their broken hearts.”

— Katie Cotugno

23. “To see Harry Styles last summer, and if you say anything about it, this whole thing is off.”

— Katie Cotugno

24. “I don’t know how I became this person, one of those girls with a lot of drama around her. A person whose romantic garbage literally fills an entire book.”

— Katie Cotugno

25. “I never knew that looking could do that before, that it could feel so obscenely intimate.”

— Katie Cotugno

26. “Can you allow for the possibility that you’re more special than you give yourself credit for?”

— Katie Cotugno

27. “My whole life feels undeclared.”

— Katie Cotugno

28. “I could act surprised, but this is why I cam here, isn’t it?”

— Katie Cotugno

29. “She stood awkwardly for another endless moment – a total and obvious outsider, even though this was her house where she lived. It felt like she didn’t belong anywhere. It felt like she probably never would.”

— Katie Cotugno

30. “Patrick shakes his head and we’re both on the verge of tears then, like we’ve finally destroyed each other, finally eaten each other alive. We’re never coming back from this; I know it. Both of us have finally gone too far.”

— Katie Cotugno

31. “I didn’t know how to let you go.”

— Katie Cotugno

32. “Wait, I almost shouted, but didn’t, and that would be my burden to bear.”

— Katie Cotugno

33. “It occurred to her to wonder if this was what growing up meant, to continuously find yourself in situations that you didn’t feel remotely prepared to handle.”

— Katie Cotugno

34. “Still, there’s something weirdly relaxing about being so unsophisticated, the two of us traipsing in hopeless circles like a couple of walking, talking Chicken McNuggets.”

— Katie Cotugno

35. “I didn’t know what was wrong with me, exactly, but if I kept looking at him I was afraid I’d lose it completely, in front of this boy I had wanted and wanted and wanted for so long that wanting him was built into me, part of my chemical makeup, part of my bones, so that now, even when I had him, I couldn’t stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

— Katie Cotugno

36. “It felt like he could open up my head and see inside.”

— Katie Cotugno

37. “The thing about hiding out like this was that it did get boring, every once in a while. It occurred to Gabby to wonder if possibly she was missing something great. For all her bravado, it bothered her sometimes, that she couldn’t make herself do what seemed to come so naturally to everyone else.”

— Katie Cotugno

38. “I don’t know. I think I could have been a good dad.”

— Katie Cotugno

39. “I wanted to know everything there was to know about him, wanted to hear every single one of his stories and learn all his memories well enough that they became my memories too, until there’d never been a time when we didn’t know each other.”

— Katie Cotugno

40. “I couldn’t figure out how you could go from feeling so close to a person one minute to not being sure if you even knew them the next.”

— Katie Cotugno

41. “All I could manage to do was watch him from across the room and wish there was a way to capture him, to write him down.”

— Katie Cotugno

42. “It was the thesis statement of their friendship – that comforting sameness, the knowledge that by the time a thought occurred to her, Emily was already thinking it, too. Sometimes Meg wondered if maybe they were actually the same person, split into two different bodies by some cosmic mistake.”

— Katie Cotugno