Top 40 Mary Alice Monroe Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Friendships were easy when life was going smoothly. What was hard was to be there for your friend when life got rough and the friendship was neither easy nor fun. The challenge was to forgive the friend when she failed.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

2. “Love is a sprint. Marriage is a marathon. An endurance race, if you will.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

3. “Privacy is something that we maintain for the good of ourselves and others. Secrecy we keep to separate ourselves from others, even those we love.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

4. “Research has found perceiving nature’s beauty to be a significant predictor of life satisfaction. In other words, the more one perceived nature’s beauty, the more one reported life satisfaction.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

5. “To me, the glass is half-empty some days and half-full on others. Sometimes it’s bone-dry. Or overflowing.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

6. “Basically it means there is no one correct view of the universe. We each see things from our own frame of reference.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

7. “Be strong, my baby girl. Be happy. You will survive.” And so, she vowed, would she.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

8. “I always begin with a source of inspiration that comes from nature. The story comes from my research, volunteering, and meeting the people involved in that story world. I am an intuitive writer and an image, sound, experience can all inspire a scene or a plot twist!”

— Mary Alice Monroe

9. “Mom’s are our best cheerleaders. No one else ever cares quite the same. Who else is going to be as angry at you when you do something wrong, or be as proud of you when you do something right?”

— Mary Alice Monroe

10. “And quickly. If you let it, grief could swallow you whole.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

11. “She had to learn this painful lesson. And quickly. If you let it, grief could swallow you whole.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

12. “A mother was only as happy as her most unhappy child.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

13. “The secret to happiness is to embrace the humility to accept what comes and the courage to continue on your life’s path with an open heart.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

14. “As I began researching butterflies, however, the monarch stood out among all of them. It’s the only butterfly – the only insect – that migrates like a bird or a whale!”

— Mary Alice Monroe

15. “My story will change, and so will yours. We’ll just go on changing, making a new set of choices, then living them out. That’s what life is anyway, just a long string of choices.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

16. “Synchronicity. Life isn’t a series of random events at all, but rather an expression of a deeper order.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

17. “The tree had become our unspoken symbol of that important Christmas when we had all dug deep and fought for one another – for our survival. For our family. For our happiness. And in the process, discovering the true meaning of Christmas.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

18. “I wouldn’t be worth my salt as a mother if I didn’t pass on the family recipes.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

19. “A woman’s life has so many demands because she is the axis around which so many little planets spin.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

20. “The secret to survival was in seeing the world through the eyes – and heart – of a child. That was Merry’s lesson to her sisters. To treasure life, and most of all, to love. Simply, unconditionally and with joyful abandon. To love without demanding or expecting anything in return.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

21. “But she had the chance now to make things right, at least for her daughter. She may have done a lot of things wrong, but the decision to give up her child would be the one responsible, unselfish act of her life. It was the best thing she’d ever done. But it felt like the worst.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

22. “I can’t change the past. I can’t take the hurt back. But I can soften it if I can just learn how to accept it.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

23. “The theme that runs through all my books is connection. Connection – physical and non-physical – with other humans, and connection with nature are necessary for our well-being. Without it, we are depressed, lonely, and fail to thrive.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

24. “See how people smile when they see a butterfly? They can’t help themselves. Butterflies are joy with wings.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

25. “This dog had shown more courage than I. This great, powerful, beautiful dog was willing to take a chance on me – a broken, depressed, lonely Marine.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

26. “After living at sea for twenty years or more, the female loggerhead returns to the beach of her birth to nest. She travels hundreds of miles through the Atlantic, her three-hundred-pound, eddish-brown carapace filled with hundreds of fertile eggs.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

27. “A woman does not need to live among many people to be content. She needs but one true companion, one soul mate with whom to share this long journey we call life.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

28. “When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something – anything – before it is all gone. – John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

29. “I thought of my mother and her wise advice. She’d always been there for me. Even when I was at my worst. She made me want to be a better son.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

30. “One day she would recall this very twilit evening and the sight of her children dancing on the shore and then... Yes, then she would wish she had stopped to hold their chubby hands and play tag along with them.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

31. “A mother never hears the words “I hate you” without cringing and feeling like a hopeless failure.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

32. “Our children are grown, we’ve enjoyed some success in our lives, and we’re looking for something else now to fulfill ourselves... It’s like being adolescents all over again, only this time we don’t care if everyone likes the way we look or the clothes we wear. Or even if people like us at all. That nasty competition is over. I see this as a time to be who we’ve always seen ourselves as being, deep in our hearts.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

33. “Whatever it was inside of me, whatever kernel deep inside that enabled me to believe in fairies, in Peter, in the Neverland itself, this was my source of strength. No one could ever take that away from me. As long as I believed, no matter where I was or with whom, I’d always belong. Because I was at home in my own heart.” Wendy.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

34. “She closed her eyes as his full weight stretched over her. They fit together perfectly and as they clung together her woman’s body felt that at last she had found the man’s bones from which she’d been created, and she was overcome with desire to become one flesh.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

35. “Sometimes when we see that we only have a few pages left we slow down, savoring each word, staving off the inevitable.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

36. “It was the very image of innocence. I wanted to remember this moment always, to look at it when I needed something good to hold on to.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

37. “Intuition guides us and the wise person listens.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

38. “This anger I felt wasn’t about the child at all. It’s inside me and it’s poisoning so many of my relationships. It leaves so little room for compassion.” She reached up to wipe a tear from her face. “That’s no way to live. I have to get over it. I may need some help, I don’t know. But I realized something today dredging up all those murky memories. I can’t change the past. I can’t take the hurt back. But I can soften it if I can just learn how to accept it.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

39. “Wichita. The roads here are flat and I can see for miles. Easy driving. Times like these, I wish you were sitting here beside me chatting, instead.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

40. “But strength without flexibility makes one hard. Come September, when those fierce winds blow in from the sea, those hardwoods crack, splinter and fall. But the pliant palms are resilient and they bend with the wind. This is the secret of a Southern woman. Strength, resilience and beauty. We are never hard.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

41. “The beach, the ocean, solitude – these are only a means to help you travel to the true peace and joy inside you. You must carry the magic in your heart, wherever you go.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

42. “What had Van Gogh said? I would rather die of passion than of boredom.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

43. “Bad luck is what we conveniently call our bad choices.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

44. “Why didn’t you tell me? It’s all such a complicated mess.” “Most lives are if you live long enough, my darling.” “I’ve.”

— Mary Alice Monroe

45. “You carry my love within you. A day will never dawn nor a sunset slip into the horizon when I will not think of you. I accept that the mind often dictates the heart. Yet I believe that the heart is the truer guide. So, if in the course of time you should want to come to me, do not hesitate. Know that I will be waiting for you. You will always have my heart – my love.”

— Mary Alice Monroe