Top 120 Laurie Frankel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Annus Mirabilis.” The year of wonders.”

— Laurie Frankel

2. “All life. You are never finish, never done. Never become, always becoming. You know? Life is change so is always okay you are not there yet. Is like this for you and Poppy and everyone. The people who do not understand are change. The people who afraid are change. There is no before and no after because change is what is life. You live in change, in in between.”

— Laurie Frankel

3. “You can’t tell people what to be, I’m afraid,” said Rosie. “You can only love and support who they already are.”

— Laurie Frankel

4. “Wider ranges of normal make the world a better place for everyone.”

— Laurie Frankel

5. “One day at a time. One foot in front of the other. All for one.”

— Laurie Frankel

6. “If you don’t worry about something until it’s already a problem,’ said Rosie, ’that’s not worry. That’s observation.”

— Laurie Frankel

7. “You learn over lifetimes. You keep try. You will find middle way to be. This life. Next. You find your way.”

— Laurie Frankel

8. “Annus Mirabilis.”

— Laurie Frankel

9. “One is the loneliest number.”

— Laurie Frankel

10. “I wish for my child, for all our children, a world where they can be who they are and become their most loved, blessed, appreciated selves.”

— Laurie Frankel

11. “That’s what all stories want. They want to get out, get told, get heard. Otherwise, what’s the point of stories? They want to help little boys go to sleep. They want to help stubborn mamas fall in love with dads. They want to teach people things and make them laugh and cry.”

— Laurie Frankel

12. “It’s not a book club if there isn’t wine.”

— Laurie Frankel

13. “How did you teach your small human that it’s what’s inside that counts when the truth was everyone was pretty preoccupied with what you put on over the outside too?”

— Laurie Frankel

14. “Because when a little girl wants to wear jeans and play soccer, her parents are thrilled, but when a little boy wants to wear a dress and play dolls, his parents send him to therapy and enroll him in a study. We just don’t know yet the long-term effects on these kids of puberty suppression.”

— Laurie Frankel

15. “It’s your story, sweetheart. Not just your story to pass on. Your story to make up as well. Over time, stories change; they shift; they become something new but with elements of the original and elements of what’s to come.”

— Laurie Frankel

16. “Dispelling fear. Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but by reminding themselves, and everyone else, to choose love, choose openness, to think and be calm. That there were more ways than just two, wider possibilities than hidden or betrayed, stalled or brokenhearted, male or female, right or wrong. Middle ways. Ways beyond. They.”

— Laurie Frankel

17. “Just because it’s made up, doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” said Penn. “Made up is the most powerful real there is.”

— Laurie Frankel

18. “They say it is what you never imagine can be lost that is hardest to live without.”

— Laurie Frankel

19. “All life. You are never finish, never done. Never become, always becoming.”

— Laurie Frankel

20. “This was loss that ruined your life leading straight to gain that saved it. It wasn’t silver lining; it was a whole silver sky.”

— Laurie Frankel

21. “For my child, for all our children, I want more options, more paths through the woods, wider ranges of normal, and unconditional love.”

— Laurie Frankel

22. “What was clear, however, was that the Buddha was born male, then cut off all his hair one day and got enlightened, then ended up looking like a girl. And as if that weren’t enough, the Buddha also seemed to feel that even things as unalterable as bodies were temporary, and what mattered was if you were good and honest, and forgiveness solved everything. That was how, whatever else they were, Claude and Poppy became Buddhists for life.”

— Laurie Frankel

23. “For the moment’s all there is, my darling.”

— Laurie Frankel

24. “The real trick is you have to forge your way straight ahead through the trees where there is no path.”

— Laurie Frankel

25. “Parent time is magic: downtempo and supersonic all at once, witch’s time, sorcerer hours. Suddenly, while you aren’t paying attention, everything’s changed.”

— Laurie Frankel

26. “Easy is nice, but it’s not as good as getting to be who you are or stand up for what you believe in.”

— Laurie Frankel

27. “Parenthood is like that... the harder the choice, the less likely any of the options are good ones.”

— Laurie Frankel

28. “These kids, her multitudes, they could grow up. They could move Away. They could – they would – become new, become changed, become actual adult people in progress, people she wouldn’t recognize, people she could not imagine. People remade. They would undergo miracles. They would transform. They would make magic. But they were her story, hers and Penn’s, so however wide they wandered, they would always be right here.”

— Laurie Frankel

29. “Rosie was also used to conflicting emotions, for she was a mother and knew every moment of every day that no one out in the world could ever love or value or nurture her children as well as she could and yet that it was necessary nonetheless to send them out into that world anyway.”

— Laurie Frankel

30. “Leaving wasn’t weak, and it wasn’t giving up. It was brave and hard fought, a transition like any other, difficult and scary and probably necessary in the end. Fighting it only delayed the inevitable.”

— Laurie Frankel

31. “Part of dedicating your life to studying literature is realizing that storytelling is more than just make-believe and that make-believe is far more important that we all pretend – make believe – it is. One way or another books tell the stories of their readers. But telling our lives is not the same as shaping them, whittling them away. Suddenly Jill had lost control. Her books had taken over and were in charge.”

— Laurie Frankel

32. “The novelist in me is inspired by how much raising children is like writing books: You don’t know where they’re going until they get there. You may think you do, but you’re probably wrong. Corralling and forcing them against their will to go where you first imagined they would isn’t going to work for anyone involved. Never mind you’re the one writing and raising them, they are headed in their own direction, independent of you. And scary though that is, it’s also how it should be.”

— Laurie Frankel

33. “But if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.”

— Laurie Frankel

34. “That’s what all stories want. They want to get out, get told, get heard. Otherwise, what’s the point of stories?”

— Laurie Frankel

35. “That’s what all stories want. They want to get out, get told, get heard.”

— Laurie Frankel

36. “Our first concern is his happiness of course; but not just today.” Because it wasn’t that simple, was it? Raising children was the longest of long games.”

— Laurie Frankel

37. “Anything too easily won was soon lost or else not worth winning.”

— Laurie Frankel

38. “There are few children more treasured than ill-behaved ones who belong to someone else.”

— Laurie Frankel

39. “It’s a good thing people’s needs don’t all arise at the same time; otherwise we wouldn’t be able to meet them all.”

— Laurie Frankel

40. “Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.”

— Laurie Frankel

41. “She wasn’t sure that parenting ever qualified as brave. Or maybe it always did. Because it’s not like you got a choice.”

— Laurie Frankel

42. “If you give all your worry to one thing, soon you’ll realize that’s way too much and worry about it less and you’ll feel more in control of it for keeping it at the front of your mind and that will help you worry less too.”

— Laurie Frankel

43. “Dispelling fear. Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but.”

— Laurie Frankel

44. “You have to help him see that if he’s disappearing from the world, that’s too high a price to pay for fitting in. He has to see how ‘You shouldn’t push even though you want to’ isn’t the same as ‘You shouldn’t wear a dress even though you want to.”

— Laurie Frankel

45. “If you don’t worry about something until it’s already a problem,” said Rosie, “that’s not worry. That’s observation.” The little girls who invited Poppy over had pink rooms and pink LEGOs and pink comforters over pink sheets on their pink beds.”

— Laurie Frankel

46. “Like with wine?” Poppy was intrigued. “It’s not a book club if there isn’t wine.”

— Laurie Frankel

47. “This is how you cook a novel. Some made up, some real life, all true.”

— Laurie Frankel

48. “Virtue leads straight to transformation; transformation leads instantly to happily ever after.”

— Laurie Frankel

49. “Not much of what I value in our lives is easy.”

— Laurie Frankel

50. “Fitting in and being normal doesn’t exist; not for a few years in the middle.”

— Laurie Frankel