Top 40 Lauren Beukes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Finish the damn book. Nothing else matters. Stop second guessing yourself and write it through to the end. You don’t know what you have until you’ve finished it. You don’t know how to fix it until it’s all down on the page.”

— Lauren Beukes

2. “Everyone lives three versions of themselves; a public life, a private life and a secret life.”

— Lauren Beukes

3. “Can’t reinvent the wheel. But you can put your own spin on it.”

— Lauren Beukes

4. “What I love about collaborating is that you’re working with other minds that work differently to yours.”

— Lauren Beukes

5. “She would disappear folded like origami into her own dreams.”

— Lauren Beukes

6. “World needs more angels, even plywood ones.”

— Lauren Beukes

7. “There are only so many plots in the world. It’s how they unfold that makes them interesting.”

— Lauren Beukes

8. “I’d rather be a happy Hooters waitress than a depressed out-of-work actor.”

— Lauren Beukes

9. “Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting.”

— Lauren Beukes

10. “You can’t play nice by society’s rules? Then you don’t get to play at all. No phone. No service. No life. Tendeka.”

— Lauren Beukes

11. “Shakespeare would have it wrong these days. It’s not the world that’s the stage – it’s social media, where you’re trying to put on a show. The rest of your life is rehearsals, prepping in the wings to be fabulous online.”

— Lauren Beukes

12. “Fear festers in the imagination. It’s not fear’s fault. That’s just the way it’s made. Nightmares breed. Allies become enemies. Subversives are everywhere. Paranoia justifies any persecution, and privacy is a luxury when the Reds have the bomb.”

— Lauren Beukes

13. “You have to get up pretty early in the morning to invent the news.”

— Lauren Beukes

14. “Traffic in Joburg is like the democratic process. Every time you think it’s going to get moving and take you somewhere, you hit another jam.”

— Lauren Beukes

15. “It’s hard to get justice in the real world. It’s possible in fiction.”

— Lauren Beukes

16. “There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can’t face the terror that it might all be random.”

— Lauren Beukes

17. “Fine is the very definition of mediocrity. It’s what’s polite. It’s what’s socially acceptable. We need to live brighter and deeper than just fine, my darling!”

— Lauren Beukes

18. “The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”.”

— Lauren Beukes

19. “Good manners will do that; turn a situation around. You got to treat people like people.”

— Lauren Beukes

20. “People don’t want novelty – they want the reassurance of familiarity. No-one wants to be challenged, no-one wants to have their minds blown. There is an insatiable appetite for affirmation.”

— Lauren Beukes

21. “In our patakis, our folk myths, we believe that we come to the world with a destiny we picked for ourselves in Arun. Obatala creates the human body, but you have to get your head from the potter who molds them out of clay in his warehouse. On a good day he makes beautiful heads, but sometimes he gets drunk and makes a bad head. It’s a divine defect. There’s no way to tell from the outside, but once you’ve chosen your head, you have to live your destiny.”

— Lauren Beukes

22. “This is my idea of family, actually, a sticky morass you can’t chew your way out of.”

— Lauren Beukes

23. “This is the way the world is now. Everything is public. You have to find other people who understand.”

— Lauren Beukes

24. “Grown-up relationships are complicated. We got what we needed from each other. Passion. A safety net. Some kind of solace. It’s lonely out there. But it ran its course. It was lovely while it lasted. But everything is finite. Life. Love. All this. Sadness too. Although that’s harder to let go of than happiness. – Rachel Mazrachi.”

— Lauren Beukes

25. “Keep your options open, his parents told him, but they didn’t tell him that growing older is about your options shutting down, one by one.”

— Lauren Beukes

26. “Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it’s only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.”

— Lauren Beukes

27. “They used to put people in stocks to shame them in public. Now you just need a wi-fi connection. On the internet, humiliation lives forever.”

— Lauren Beukes

28. “Anyone can find they’ve been standing on the trapdoor when they thought they were the spotlight attraction.”

— Lauren Beukes

29. “The biggest fairy tale is that justice works because it doesn’t.”

— Lauren Beukes

30. “The future is not as loud as war, but it is relentless. It has a terrible fury all its own.”

— Lauren Beukes

31. “I really wanted to believe that there were these magic celestial bodies that would direct my life, tell me what to do, and it turns out it’s not stars, it’s some bits of screwy DNA. I’m just meat with faulty programming.”

— Lauren Beukes

32. “You can bury your radical magazines and tear up your sexually perverse sketches and burn your sheets. But how do you erase who you are?”

— Lauren Beukes

33. “Time heals. Crushes let up. Splinters work their way out. Doesn’t mean they don’t leave scars that itch.”

— Lauren Beukes

34. “Only other people can make you feel real.”

— Lauren Beukes

35. “Poison shared is poison halved. Or maybe it just poisons everyone equally.”

— Lauren Beukes

36. “The problem with snapshots is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.”

— Lauren Beukes

37. “Fashion is only different skins for different flavours of you.”

— Lauren Beukes

38. “Always thought being a writer would be one of the most useless things you could be in a zombie apocalypse, but it turns out arts and culture and storytelling is what helps us get through. Along with science, doctors, nurses, delivery people, farm workers and supermarket cashiers.”

— Lauren Beukes

39. “The original stories are mined out, and all that’s left is fool’s gold.”

— Lauren Beukes

40. “Everyone is broken.”

— Lauren Beukes

41. “Don’t get too excited. The thing about fallen women is that they sure are clumsy.”

— Lauren Beukes

42. “Pale fields of grass twitch and shiver in the wind. These things make the fact of a murder distant and unseemly. Beauty allows for plausible deniability. Maybe that’s beauty’s entire function in the world, Cole thinks: that you can blind yourself with it.”

— Lauren Beukes

43. “Ruins are haunted by history, but so are people.”

— Lauren Beukes

44. “Beauty allows for plausible deniability. Maybe that’s beauty’s entire function in the world, Cole thinks: that you can blind yourself with it.”

— Lauren Beukes