Top 120 Lily King Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “Who are we and were are we going? Why are we, with all our “progress” so limited in understanding and sympathy and the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?”

— Lily King

102. “Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.”

— Lily King

103. “Lynn didn’t know my mother, but she’s the type of person my mother loved: quick, outspoken, a thin but charming layer of femininity covering a masculine confidence and drive.”

— Lily King

104. “What’s the point of anyone’s search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.”

— Lily King

105. “I meet Silas at the movie theater on Church Street. We choose seats close to the front. He’s wearing a striped wool hat that he keeps on the whole movie, and our bodies never touch. I’ve never been more aware of not touching someone in my life.”

— Lily King

106. “She wondered how other people adjusted to vacations. It was such an unpleasant feeling, like gunning a car in neutral.”

— Lily King

107. “I feel like I got most of life’s lessons before i turned six. For me, other people are the point, but other people can disappear. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

— Lily King

108. “He calls me his waif, his down-on-her-luck waitress, but he takes it all lightly. In fact, Holly Golightly is one of his names for me. If we lived together I would expose myself as the blighted Jean Rhys character I really am.”

— Lily King

109. “All these pulls on me that cancel one another out like an algebraic equation I can’t solve.”

— Lily King

110. “But the world is deaf. The world – and really I mean the West – has no interest in change or self-improvement.”

— Lily King

111. “Soon Paula would begin complaining that he didn’t understand her, didn’t appreciate her, didn’t love her enough, when in fact he loved her so much his heart often felt shredded by it. But people always wanted words for all that roiled inside you.”

— Lily King

112. “Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.”

— Lily King

113. “You don’t always see how much other people are shaping you. What.”

— Lily King

114. “The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane.”

— Lily King

115. “I don’t know how everyone else is getting by, paying their bills, and sleeping through the night.”

— Lily King

116. “Someday we will remember even these our hardships with pleasure.”

— Lily King

117. “And if we took away Brian’s salary at Schwab and your dad’s little allowance, how much money would you have working part-time at that non-profit? Would you be able to afford Bermuda or your two-bedroom in SoHo? Are you more of an adult because two men are giving you the illusion of self-sufficiency?”

— Lily King

118. “Socially we balanced each other out. He was the guy who came into the room and everyone was relieved. I made people deeply uneasy, myself most of all.”

— Lily King

119. “It was a trick no one expected of an American, the combination of a good ear, a good memory, and an understanding of the rules of grammar, so that I appeared more of a prodigy than I was.”

— Lily King

120. “I’m aware that I had ideas about the future that I hadn’t discussed with myself.”

— Lily King

121. “I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you’ve disappointed them.”

— Lily King

122. “I loved the sound of our two typewriters; it felt like we were in a band, making a strange sort of music. It felt like I was part of something, and that the work was important. She always made me feel that the work was important. And then her typewriter stopped and she was watching me. ‘Don’t stop’ I said. ‘Your typing makes my brain work better.”

— Lily King

123. “Eternalism is the belief that everything that is, has been, and will be exists right now and forever, all at once. Presentism is the belief that only what exists in the present exists at all.”

— Lily King

124. “All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It’s all fear. If we didn’t have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.”

— Lily King

125. “No one will actually come out and say this nowadays, but women are at their best when they’re writing about men: their husbands, their fathers, their lost loves. It’s when they start writing about themselves that they become unreadable.”

— Lily King

126. “I think of my mother when I’m on a plane. I think of her many places, even though she’s been gone sixteen years now. She’s never seen my boys, but she’s helped me raise them. I know how much she loves them. I feel that.”

— Lily King

127. “I’ve forgotten what gets revealed right after you break up with someone.”

— Lily King

128. “I have never understood why a person who is not a genius bothers with art. What’s the point? You’ll never have the satisfaction of having created something indispensable.”

— Lily King

129. “Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That’s what I love about Bernhard in the book. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it’s contagious because while you’re reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school.”

— Lily King

130. “You knew I’d write a book about you someday. You said once that I’d dredged up the whole hit parade minus you. I’ll never know how you’d tell it. For me it begins here. Like this.”

— Lily King

131. “And yet she wrote with an urgency most of us felt but did not have the courage to reveal, because we were too beholden to the traditions of the old sciences. For so long I’d felt that what I’d been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions.”

— Lily King

132. “You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you’re reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.”

— Lily King

133. “I try to write something new. It’s bad and I stop after a few sentences. Even though I didn’t feel it at the time, I got into a rhythm with the old novel. I knew those characters and how to write them. I heard their voices and I saw their gestures and anything else feels fake and stiff. I ache for them, people I also once felt were stiff and fake, but who now seem like the only people I could ever write about.”

— Lily King

134. “It was a skill of mine, splitting myself in half, pretending to be childish and oblivious while shifting through adult exchanges with the focus and discrimination of a forensic detective.”

— Lily King

135. “I still have moments when I feel that, when it feels like she’s inside me, and there’s no difference between us or that the difference doesn’t matter. I think it is all that love. All that love has to go somewhere.”

— Lily King

136. “A friend gave it to me.’ For a moment I was barefoot in our road, watching his car disappear.”

— Lily King

137. “I have loved you all my life,′ I whisper. ‘See you after the next bang.”

— Lily King

138. “It’s a sense of despair about writing itself, a sort of throwing up of hands, as if to say I’ll put this down on the page but it’s not what I really mean because what I really mean cannot be put into words.”

— Lily King