Top 160 Maria Semple Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Bernadette and her enthusiasm were like a hippo and water: get between them and you’ll be trampled to death.”

— Maria Semple

102. “I need you to know how hard it is for me sometimes.” Mom had her hand on mine. “What’s hard?” “The banality of life,” she said. “But it won’t keep me from taking you to the South Pole.” “We’re not going to the South Pole!” “I know. It’s a hundred below zero at the South Pole. Only scientists go to the South Pole. I started reading one of the books.”

— Maria Semple

103. “But you have a vision. You put a frame around it. You sign your name anyway. That’s the risk. That’s the leap. That’s the madness: thinking anyone’s going to care.”

— Maria Semple

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

— Maria Semple

105. “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

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

— Maria Semple

107. “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

108. “When I said my dad worked at Microsoft, they openly mocked me. I had a PC and listened to music on my Zune. What is that thing? people would ask in the most offended way, like I had just taken a huge stinky poop and stuck earbuds into it.”

— Maria Semple

109. “Sometimes Victory knocks on your window even though you never sent out an invitation.”

— Maria Semple

110. “OUTDOORSY DAD: Bing’s better.”

— Maria Semple

111. “Ollie-O was right about buzz being “viral.” Today at Whole Foods, a woman I didn’t even recognize recognized me and said she was looking forward to my brunch. Judging from the contents of her shopping cart – imported cheese, organic raspberries, fruit wash spray – she is the exact quality of parent we need at Galer Street. I saw her in the parking lot. She was driving a Lexus. Not a Mercedes, but close enough! Did you hear? Shipping a sick child off to boarding school! Why am I not surprised?”

— Maria Semple

112. “Know what one of the guys at the drive-through Starbucks has on his forearm?” Bernadette said. “A paper clip! It used to be so daring to get a tattoo. And now people are tattooing office supplies on their bodies.”

— Maria Semple

113. “But fear not: I do underdog.”

— Maria Semple

114. “Will you stop treating this as a joke?” Dad told Mom. “I look at you, Bernadette, and I’m scared. You won’t talk to me. You won’t go to a doctor. You’re better than this.” “Dad,” I said, “stop freaking out.” “Yeah, really,” Kennedy said. “Happy birthday to me.” There was a moment of quiet, then me and Kennedy burst into giggles. “I’m, like, happy birthday to me,” Kennedy said, which triggered another fit of laughter.”

— Maria Semple

115. “The only way to get to Antarctica is by cruise ship. Even the smallest one has 150 passengers, which translates into me being trapped with 149 other people who will uniquely annoy the hell out of me.”

— Maria Semple

116. “Manjula,” the Internet assistant, had stolen all his miles on American Airlines last week.”

— Maria Semple

117. “He wasn’t fat, exactly. He reminded Eleanor of how papayas swelled during the rainy season or the way Greg Gumbel looked like someone had taken a bicycle pump to Bryant Gumbel.”

— Maria Semple

118. “Anytime I get into a one-on-one social situation, especially if there’s something at stake, my anxiety spikes. I talk fast. I jump topics unexpectedly. I say shocking things.”

— Maria Semple

119. “I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is the energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness.”

— Maria Semple

120. “If I’m forced to be honest, here’s an account of how I left the world last week: worse, worse, better, worse, same, worse, same. Not an inventory to make one swell with pride. I don’t necessarily need to make the world a better place, mind you. Today, I will live by the Hippocratic oath: first do no harm. How.”

— Maria Semple

121. “And don’t get me started on Canadians. It’s a whole thing.”

— Maria Semple

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

— Maria Semple

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Maria Semple

126. “Mercedes Parents.”

— Maria Semple

127. “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

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

— Maria Semple

129. “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

130. “S Surpasses Excellence.”

— Maria Semple

131. “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

132. “On the drive home, I started playing my new flute. Mom never lets me play in the car because she’s afraid someone might crash into us and my flute will impale me into the seat. I find that ridiculous, because how could that even happen?”

— Maria Semple

133. “Bucky,” Lester said. “The other night I started to explain to someone your philosophy on Southern accents, but all I could remember was that it defied logic.” “Southern accents are hillbilly,” Bucky said with petulance. “Anyone with a proper education, I don’t care if he’s never stepped foot out of the South, doesn’t go around sounding like Jubilation T. Cornpone. If he does, it’s a put-on. And please, I’m in no mood to rehash the obvious.”

— Maria Semple

134. “Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.”

— Maria Semple

135. “I don’t know if it’s possible to feel everything all at once, so much that you think you’re going to burst.”

— Maria Semple

136. “As Violet had put it, You can’t secretly abort your husband’s baby because you think he’s retarded and expect to stay happily married.”

— Maria Semple

137. “The only thing you can blame Elgie for is he makes life look so damn simple: do what you love. In his case, that means working, spending.”

— Maria Semple

138. “You spent ten years of your life and billions of dollars inventing something so people don’t have to live their own lives. Mom found a way of doing it for seventy-five cents an hour.”

— Maria Semple

139. “I don’t mean to ruin the ending for you, sweet child, but life is one long headwind. To make any kind of impact requires self-will bordering on madness. The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. My God, I’m making it sound so glamorous and personal! What the world is, more than anything? It’s indifferent.”

— Maria Semple

140. “The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. My God, I’m making it sound so glamorous and personal! What the world is, more than anything? It’s indifferent.”

— Maria Semple

141. “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she said. “I’m going to move to Wallingford and rent a house off campus. I already got a job working in the Choate dining hall.”

— Maria Semple

142. “Attached please find a scan of an emergency room bill I suppose I should pay. One of the gnats at Galer Street claims I ran over her foot at pickup. I would laugh at the whole thing, but I’m too bored. See, that’s why I call the mothers there “gnats.” Because they’re annoying, but not so annoying that you actually want to spend valuable energy on them.”

— Maria Semple

143. “Bernadette pulled the car over, took off her seat belt, and turned around. “That’s right,” she told the girls. “You’re bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.”

— Maria Semple

144. “I need you to know how hard it is for me sometimes.’ Mom had her hand on mine. ‘What’s hard?’ ‘The banality of life,’ she said. ‘But it won’t keep me from taking you to the South Pole.”

— Maria Semple

145. “Audrey Griffin’s eyes were wild, and she had a big smile as usual, and she was shaking a piece of paper at us. Her gray hair was coming out of its ponytail, and she was wearing clogs, and under her down vest you could see the pleats on her jeans bulging out. It was hard not to watch.”

— Maria Semple

146. “But with every step, I felt my anger falling way. Underneath that anger: fear. In the middle of one of her self-help phases, Ivy had once proclaimed that all anger was fear. I’d long since wondered what, if anything, was underneath all fear.”

— Maria Semple

147. “For the past twenty years I’ve been in training for overwintering at the South Pole! I knew I was up to something.”

— Maria Semple

148. “Judging from the contents of her shopping cart – imported cheese, organic raspberries, fruit wash spray – she is the exact quality of parent we need at Galer Street. I saw her in the parking lot. She was driving a Lexus. Not a Mercedes, but close enough!”

— Maria Semple

149. “In extreme cases, a person’s coping mechanisms can be so inadequate that the stressor causes a psychotic break.”

— Maria Semple

150. “Bee exhibits extraordinary concentration when working alone; when working in a group, she is a quiet and confident leader.”

— Maria Semple