Top 160 Maria Semple Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “None of what’s become of me was Seattle’s fault. Well, it might be Seattle’s fault. The people are pretty boring. But let’s withhold final judgment until I start being more of an artist and less of a menace.”

— Maria Semple

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

— Maria Semple

54. “Every feeling I ever knew was up in that sky.”

— Maria Semple

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

— Maria Semple

56. “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

57. “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

58. “There was no relief deeper than being loved by the person who’d known you the longest.”

— Maria Semple

59. “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

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

— Maria Semple

61. “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

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

— Maria Semple

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

— Maria Semple

64. “I loved you all over again.”

— Maria Semple

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Maria Semple

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Maria Semple

72. “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

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

— Maria Semple

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Maria Semple

78. “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

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

— Maria Semple

80. “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

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

— Maria Semple

82. “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

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

— Maria Semple

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Maria Semple

88. “The only place tourists go is the Antarctic Peninsula, which is like the Florida Keys of Antarctica.”

— Maria Semple

89. “What kind of support group is this?” I exploded. “I’ll tell you who’s the victim here. It’s me, and the abusers are you, you church-basement sadists!” I stormed out and got ice cream and cried in my car. That was the high point.”

— Maria Semple

90. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,’” Alonzo said wistfully. “Now college students won’t know Yeats said that because he’s the root of evil.”

— Maria Semple

91. “Was it happiness I’d found in my long marriage? Or capitulation? Or is that all happiness is, capitulation?”

— Maria Semple

92. “Mercedes Parents.”

— Maria Semple

93. “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

94. “1. The choice of private schools is both fear-based and aspirational. Mercedes Parents are afraid their children won’t get “the best education possible,” which has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the number of other Mercedes Parents at a school. 2.”

— Maria Semple

95. “Sitting at the desk was a woman in a raincoat with a foil-covered plate in her lap. I asked for Mr. Branch. This woman explained she was a friend of the administrator’s and had come to surprise her with dinner. She said everyone was in a meeting in the big theater downstairs. I said I, too, had come on personal business. She noticed the Madrona Hill ID clipped to my briefcase and said something to the effect of “Madrona Hill? Hi-ho, I’ll say that’s personal business!”

— Maria Semple

96. “I’ll go nuts inside. He gets to keep creating, and I’m the one who’s still in pieces?”

— Maria Semple

97. “21. Mr. Koenig reports that Ms. Griffin commenced approximately five minutes of hysterically expressing disappointment at her son’s choice of friends. 22.”

— Maria Semple

98. “S Surpasses Excellence.”

— Maria Semple

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

— Maria Semple

100. “All roads lead to raising the money to buy a new campus. The best way to achieve it is to pack the incoming kindergarten class with Mercedes Parents.”

— Maria Semple