Top 40 Kelly Quindlen Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Because before you can worry about who’s in your passenger seat, you have to learn to drive yourself.”

— Kelly Quindlen

2. “I remember feeling like I was both too much and not enough.”

— Kelly Quindlen

3. “Our fingers brush and I feel the electricity on our skin, radiant enough to power this street full of lights.”

— Kelly Quindlen

4. “I can tell you that I believe – that the human heart’s mysterious ability to love others is never wrong. Your heart will never ask your permission to love. It’s going to love whomever it was made to love, and the best thing you can do is follow it.”

— Kelly Quindlen

5. “I think saying what you’re afraid of makes you brave.”

— Kelly Quindlen

6. “She sets a hand on the cold sand and pushes herself forward until her lips meet Baker’s with the delicate touch of tree leaves. And there on the beach, with the sand, the sky, and the water as their witnesses, Baker kisses her back, and Hannah hopes desperately that the crashing of the waves is a celebration rather than a condemnation.”

— Kelly Quindlen

7. “And I think being friends with someone should be like the concept of infinity – like you truly believe that person has no limits, and you just want to keep counting upward with them to see where they go.”

— Kelly Quindlen

8. “I hate you,” I say. Then I kiss her and kiss her and kiss her.”

— Kelly Quindlen

9. “Hannah looks through the windshield and begs the sky that her life will always be like this – large and loud and brimming with youth, but always followed by the quiet drive home and the promise of ending the night with her favorite person in the world.”

— Kelly Quindlen

10. “We weren’t made to be alone. We were made to love. And when we love, we automatically know God without trying to, because God is love. If we love as he made us to love – if we love with our hearts instead of our criteria – then we simply are love.”

— Kelly Quindlen

11. “Love ultimately wins, Hannah. Love ultimately saves.”

— Kelly Quindlen

12. “She sees herself, and she does not look away.”

— Kelly Quindlen

13. “Hannah holds the rose up to her face, but she can’t smell anything. ‘Awesome,’ she says, the word scraping up from some hollow place inside her stomach.”

— Kelly Quindlen

14. “No one ever told me that it might be different. That it would be okay to be different.”

— Kelly Quindlen

15. “We have to take ownership for our words. Words are powerful. They can be devastating. If your words carry hate – if they shame others, if they make them doubt that they are loved – Hannah, you don’t want to own words like that.”

— Kelly Quindlen

16. “Hannah stomps, buries, suffocates, wishes for death. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m good.”

— Kelly Quindlen

17. “They ride over pebbles and patches of dusk-colored sunlight, underneath the spread arms of the live oaks and the promise of their green leaves, past houses full of people and rules and prayers and magic. Hannah looks at Baker, and Baker extends her hand outward into the space between them, holding it palm-up for Hannah to take, right there in the heart of the garden.”

— Kelly Quindlen

18. “She lies there, bleeding into the sky, until the sky starts to bleed red with morning.”

— Kelly Quindlen

19. “People break our hearts, but they create more room in them first, and that room makes it possible for us to become more ourselves.”

— Kelly Quindlen

20. “My sweet girls, let me tell you something. You will move through life and fall in love with many different people, and at some point, you will get your heart broken. It’s unavoidable. The key is to not be afraid of the breaking. People break our hearts, but they create more room in them first, and that room makes it possible for us to become more ourselves.”

— Kelly Quindlen

21. “She’d ask him to stand in her kitchen when Baker came over to hang out. She’d have him witness Baker’s laughter, her smile, her kind heart, her vulnerability. Baker wouldn’t see him, but he would see everything: the goodness of her heart and the light in her eyes. And afterwards, Hannah would ask him, ‘How could I not love her?”

— Kelly Quindlen

22. “I hurt you,” Baker cries. “I hurt the one person I love more than anyone else in the world.”

— Kelly Quindlen

23. “I just wish people could be more creative with their ignorance.”

— Kelly Quindlen

24. “Hate like that – when it’s disguised as love, or righteousness or pity – I’m not going to subject you to hate like that.”

— Kelly Quindlen

25. “She wakes Friday morning with a pit in her stomach. She walks to the window and lifts it open, and the humid air collects on her skin. The fragile light of early morning stretches across the sky and the birds sing to each other about its promise.”

— Kelly Quindlen

26. “Hannah stands to leave, but Ms. Carpenter rests a hand on her arm. ‘Hannah,’ she says, ‘I want you to know I’m proud of you. Keep going, okay? Don’t lose faith.”

— Kelly Quindlen

27. “It takes me a while to fall asleep. I can feel Irene struggling, too. It feels too intimate, too revealing, to sleep alongside each other like this. I’m too attuned to her breathing cycle, to the sound of her cheek finding the cold part of the pillow. I’m too aware of the smell of her hair, only inches from my face.”

— Kelly Quindlen

28. “Baker doesn’t catch her eye or smile at her, and every joke or remark Hannah says to the others seems to materialize from a scared, hollow place inside of her.”

— Kelly Quindlen

29. “She can tell by the whisper of the air and the pattern of the stars, by the swell of her heart and the immediacy of her pain. They are the only two humans on the earth tonight.”

— Kelly Quindlen

30. “She had yet to learn that playing for a losing girl’s basketball team in a quirky suburban town made you a nobody. I had yet to learn that being a nobody is supposed to bother me.”

— Kelly Quindlen

31. “I’m surprised you can stand with a spine that weak.”

— Kelly Quindlen

32. “And then Baker comes to stand behind her and hugs her around her middle, and suddenly the steam from the pot spreads all over Hannah’s body, settling into the hammock of her torso and finding its way to her ears and fingertips.”

— Kelly Quindlen

33. “She thinks I should have tried harder. And I don’t know, maybe I should have. But sometimes it just hurts too much.”

— Kelly Quindlen

34. “Like being with you makes me a thousand times better than I am. Like my eyes are clearer when I look at things. And when I’m not with you, it’s like – like my heart can’t breathe.”

— Kelly Quindlen

35. “You would be wrong.”

— Kelly Quindlen

36. “You grow up with these ideas about Teenagers, about their wild, vibrant, dramatic lives of breaking rules and making out and Being Alive, and you know that it’s your destiny to become one of them someday, but suddenly you’re seventeen and you’re watching people cannonball into a swimming pool in the pouring rain, and you realize you still haven’t become a real Teenager, and maybe you never will.”

— Kelly Quindlen

37. “She looks up at these trees and marvels at their existence, at how they just are what they were created to be, how they tower proudly on their wooden trunks, how they sway in the breeze and move their leaves like piano keys, and she prays that she can be like them, that she can innately grasp her existence and live it out without questioning.”

— Kelly Quindlen

38. “In the anxious silence of a hospital chapel, with one small candle to light the darkness, five teenagers hold hands and pray.”

— Kelly Quindlen

39. “They speak a common language I’ve never understood, with shimmery words like contouring and bandeaus and bralettes. It’s their birthright, this ability to be like any other girl.”

— Kelly Quindlen

40. “You’ll have nothing left of her, but you’ll have yourself, Scottie.”

— Kelly Quindlen

41. “She lays her hand along my jaw and kisses me like she means it, and I am breathless and weightless and dizzy at the very fact of her. Lips and tongue and teeth, her hair and her skin and her perfume, and more than anything, her very essence, her fire and her flaws and that steely determination to be better, to always be better.”

— Kelly Quindlen