Top 160 Maria Semple Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Every feeling I ever knew was up in that sky.”

— Maria Semple

52. “Love wouldn’t make being a mother any less boring or draining or bewildering.”

— Maria Semple

53. “The penguins that spent most of their time fighting were the ones with no chicks... It’s like they’re supposed to be taking care of their chicks. But because they don’t have any, they have nothing to do with all their energy. So they just pick fights.”

— Maria Semple

54. “If you’re so hell-bent on placing blame, I suggest you look in the mirror.”

— Maria Semple

55. “That city tour sounds fun!” Dad said. You almost have to feel sorry for him with his taped-over lens and desperate attitude, until you remember this whole thing started because he tried to get Mom locked up in a mental hospital. “Yeah,” I said. “Do you want to go on it?” “I do,” he said, all hopeful and touched. “Have fun.” I grabbed my backpack and headed to the pool.”

— Maria Semple

56. “That was happiness. Not the framed greatest hits, but the moments in between. At the time, I hadn’t pegged them as being particularly happy. But now, looking back at those phantom snapshots, I’m struck by my calm, my ease, the evident comfort with my life. I’m happy in retrospect.”

— Maria Semple

57. “My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.”

— Maria Semple

58. “It’s a quantum physics concept where everything that can happen, is happening, in an infinite number of parallel universes.”

— Maria Semple

59. “Pain I’m good with. It’s discomfort I can’t handle.”

— Maria Semple

60. “Mad About You fit my sensibility the most of any show that I worked on, and as a result, it was really fun. It felt like a very natural fit.”

— Maria Semple

61. “As much as I try not to engage people in the grocery checkout, I couldn’t resist one day when I overheard one refer to Seattle as “cosmopolitan.” Encouraged, I asked, “Really?” She said, Sure, Seattle is full of people from all over. “Like where?” Her answer, “Alaska. I have a ton of friends from Alaska.” Whoomp, there it is.”

— Maria Semple

62. “There was something unspeakably noble about their age, their scale, their lack of consciousness, their right to exist. Every single iceberg filled me with feelings of sadness and wonder.”

— Maria Semple

63. “Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.”

— Maria Semple

64. “So why didn’t I switch schools? The other good schools I could have sent Bee to... well, to get to them, I’d have to drive past a Buca di Beppo. I hated my life enough without having to drive past a Buca di Beppo four times a day.”

— Maria Semple

65. “As far as I’m concerned, the only thing sweeter than seeing a friend is that friend canceling on me.”

— Maria Semple

66. “I loved you all over again.”

— Maria Semple

67. “Please see that Bee gets this.” She slipped the documents back in the envelope. “I know it’s a lot. But she can handle it. I’d rather ruin her with the truth than ruin her with lies.” “She won’t be ruined,” I said.”

— Maria Semple

68. “I was surrounded by the surgeons and residents and nurses who helped me stay alive when I was born blue and if it weren’t for them I would be dead now. All those people I didn’t even know, I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup if I had to, but they had worked their whole lives to get the knowledge that ended up saving my life. It was because of them that I was in this magnificent wave of people and music.”

— Maria Semple

69. “You know how your brain turns to mush? How it starts when you’re pregnant? You laugh, full of wonder and conspiracy, and you chide yourself, Me and my pregnancy brain! Then you give birth and your brain doesn’t return? But you’re breast-feeding, so you laugh, as if you’re a member of an exclusive club? Me and my nursing brain! But then you stop nursing and the terrible truth descends: Your good brain is never coming back. You’ve traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood.”

— Maria Semple

70. “When people die, their handwriting dies too. You don’t think about that.”

— Maria Semple

71. “Because the other way wasn’t working. The waking up just to get the day over with until it was time for bed. The grinding it out was a disgrace, an affront to the honor and long shot of being alive at all.”

— Maria Semple

72. “You know how you’re in the middle of a sentence and you realize at the end you’re going to need to call up a certain word and you’re worried you won’t be able to, but you’re already committed so you hurtle along and then pause because you’ve arrived at the end but the word hasn’t? And it’s not even a ten-dollar word you’re after, like polemic or shibboleth, but a two-dollar word, like distinctive, so you just end up saying amazing?”

— Maria Semple

73. “Her goal is always deep understanding of a given topic, not merely getting a good grade.”

— Maria Semple

74. “I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. Im constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.”

— Maria Semple

75. “She’s wearing this backpack with yarn coming out of it, so she can knit while she’s standing.”

— Maria Semple

76. “Living too long in New York does that to a girl, gives her the false sense that the world is full of interesting people. Or at least people who are crazy in an interesting way.”

— Maria Semple

77. “I think because I try to keep things as real as I can, or I try to start from a place of reality, I almost don’t have the imagination to write a book that’s not set where I am.”

— Maria Semple

78. “There’s a story that during the filming of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola had a sign on his trailer: “Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two.”

— Maria Semple

79. “I tried to love Dad and not hate him for his fake cheer and the way he gets dressed. I tried to imagine what Mom saw in him back when she was an architect. I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who finds every little thing he does a total delight. It was sad, though, because the thought of him and all his accessories always made me sick. I wished I’d never made the connection about Dad being a gigantic girl, because once you realize something like that, it’s hard to go back.”

— Maria Semple

80. “The drivers here are horrible. And by horrible, I mean they don’t realize I have someplace to be.”

— Maria Semple

81. “Every feeling I ever knew was up in that sky: Twinkling joyous sunlight; airy, giggling cloud wisps; blinding columns of sun. Orbs of gold, pink, flesh, utterly cheesy in their luminosity. Gigantic puffy clouds, welcoming, forgiving, repeating infinitely across the horizon as if between mirrors; and slices of rain, pounding wet misery in the distance now, but soon on us, and in another part of the sky, a black stain, rainless.”

— Maria Semple

82. “A live concert needs to be listened to live. Otherwise, it’s like eating day-old salad.”

— Maria Semple

83. “Earlier this year, I’d told a mother at school I’d been married fifteen year. She asked, “What’s the secret to a long marriage?” I thought for a second, then answered, “Staying married.”

— Maria Semple

84. “Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply to what they’re saying. Today I’ll wear a dress. Today I’ll play a board game.”

— Maria Semple

85. “What the world is, more than anything? It’s indifferent.”

— Maria Semple

86. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

— Maria Semple

87. “Everything I’d set out to achieve in this lifetime, I’d done, with grace to spare. Except loving well the people I loved the most.”

— Maria Semple

88. “I’m just saying, when things are bad, there’s nobody better to have in your corner than Mom.”

— Maria Semple

89. “I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, You wouldn’t care about what other people thought about you if you realized how seldom they actually did.”

— Maria Semple

90. “I just told you that to trick you.” It’s pretty obvious to me now that you can’t say that to somebody and expect them to be fine with it. But I was too excited.”

— Maria Semple

91. “I guess what I’m saying is, I was a ghost on a ghost ship in a ghost land.”

— Maria Semple

92. “Grab your crampons because we have an uphill climb. But fear not: I do underdog.”

— Maria Semple

93. “Galer Street School is a place where compassion, academics, and global connectitude join together to create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet. Student:.”

— Maria Semple

94. “Stepping off the plane in Miami was like reentering the womb. Was it the welcoming voices of LeBron James and Gloria Estefan? No, it was the scent of Cinnabon.”

— Maria Semple

95. “She loved me for the dangers I had passed And I loved her that she did pity them.”

— Maria Semple

96. “He treats everyone the same, his curiosity a gentle rain.”

— Maria Semple

97. “Bernadette and her enthusiasm were like a hippo and water: get between them and you’ll be trampled to death.”

— Maria Semple

98. “There’s a saying,” Dad said. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

— Maria Semple

99. “Twinkling joyous sunlight; airy, giggling cloud wisps; blinding columns of sun. Orbs of gold, pink, flesh, utterly cheesy in their luminosity. Gigantic puffy clouds, welcoming, forgiving, repeating infinitely across the horizon as if between mirrors;.”

— Maria Semple

100. “When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins.”

— Maria Semple