Top 120 Lily King Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.”

— Lily King

2. “I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person.”

— Lily King

3. “For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around each other’s brain.”

— Lily King

4. “I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.”

— Lily King

5. “You don’t realize how much effort you’ve put into covering things up until you try to dig them out.”

— Lily King

6. “It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.”

— Lily King

7. “I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them.”

— Lily King

8. “He is wine and bread and deep in my stomach.”

— Lily King

9. “It’s always a choice between fireworks and coffee in bed,′ Fabiana says. ‘It always is.”

— Lily King

10. “The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead. But it’s hard to know what to say next.”

— Lily King

11. “When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.’ And now she’s dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.”

— Lily King

12. “She laughed. ‘Was she wine or bread to you?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘It’s from an Amy Lowell poem we all loved in college. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.”

— Lily King

13. “There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose. I feel all that as I hold the phone and listen to Manolo talk about W-4s and the study hall schedule and my mailbox combination and faculty parking. For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.”

— Lily King

14. “Fitzgerald said that the sign of genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. But what if you hold two contradictory fears? Are you still some kind of a genius?”

— Lily King

15. “You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.”

— Lily King

16. “There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose.”

— Lily King

17. “Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.”

— Lily King

18. “Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination. – Ruth Benedict.”

— Lily King

19. “If we didn’t have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.”

— Lily King

20. “I love these geese. They make my chest tight and full and help me believe that things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for.”

— Lily King

21. “I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.”

— Lily King

22. “It’s good to get whacked open at least once, though,′ she says. ‘You can’t really love from inside a big, thick shell.”

— Lily King

23. “I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake.”

— Lily King

24. “Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake.”

— Lily King

25. “The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s.”

— Lily King

26. “Funny how when you have a purpose the misery goes and hides.”

— Lily King

27. “I sing to the geese. And I feel her. It’s different from remembering her or yearning for her. I feel her near me. I don’t know if she is the geese or the river or the sky or the moon. I don’t know if she is outside of me or inside of me, but she is here. I feel her love for me. I feel my love reach her. A brief, easy exchange.”

— Lily King

28. “I’ll miss them when they take flight. I won’t be there. Their fast excited chatter, their wings finally spread wide, their feet tucking in behind them. Wheels up. I’ll miss it. I’ll be in class or at my desk or in bed when they cut across the sky.”

— Lily King

29. “Go. Go to your beautiful dances, your beautiful ceremonies. And we will bury our dead.”

— Lily King

30. “Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was ’a major means to the good life.”

— Lily King

31. “She looks embarrassed, sitting on that stool, to be who she is now. She seems pained by all the compliments Muriel’s colleagues are giving her. Success rests more easily on men.”

— Lily King

32. “Tears are not endless.”

— Lily King

33. “I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers.”

— Lily King

34. “He didn’t like her strong, nor did he like her weak.”

— Lily King

35. “I has a last look at the sea, which was rumpled and agitated, a thick muscle that would hold on tight to everything it swallowed.”

— Lily King

36. “I’m scared of men in cars and men in doorways, men in groups and men alone. They are menacing. Men-acing. Men-dacious. Men-tal.”

— Lily King

37. “I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.”

— Lily King

38. “I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.”

— Lily King

39. “Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision.”

— Lily King

40. “Alone was not something you saw among tribes she’d studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. The culture often had proverbs against it. Not even a possum walks alone was the Tam’s most repeated one.”

— Lily King

41. “The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.”

— Lily King

42. “I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubt and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that’s still inside me.”

— Lily King

43. “I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it’s an opening that you’re talking into. With other people, people who haven’t been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.”

— Lily King

44. “It was so awful and weird. I could see all the things I had loved about him, I could see them, but I didn’t love them anymore.”

— Lily King

45. “All the people she was missing, the tribes she would never know and words she would never hear, the worry that they might right now be passing the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.”

— Lily King

46. “Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?”

— Lily King

47. “Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.”

— Lily King

48. “It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.”

— Lily King

49. “But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She.”

— Lily King

50. “I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be.”

— Lily King