Top 300 Maureen Johnson Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Nothing is longer than a little while.”

— Maureen Johnson

202. “Yeah,” Nate said. “I guess it would be like that if I could go somewhere in a book. I always wanted stories to be real, so I started writing my own. That seemed to make it more real.”

— Maureen Johnson

203. “Some people believe that they are guided by forces, that the universe cuts paths for them through the dense forest of life, showing them where to go.”

— Maureen Johnson

204. “Sometimes, you have to wait a little bit for this kind of gratification, but it’s still worth it.”

— Maureen Johnson

205. “It was a deathtrap, a meandering thread of madness. It suggested that there was something about English people that she may never understand.”

— Maureen Johnson

206. “The words seemed to come from a place deep inside me, far beyond the place where I stored them, past the ideas.”

— Maureen Johnson

207. “I could pretend, at least, and if I pretended long enough, maybe I could make it into a reality.”

— Maureen Johnson

208. “Noah was many things, but funny was not one of them.”

— Maureen Johnson

209. “Two students had approached Leonard while he was staring at the painting, a boy and a girl. The boy was beautiful – his hair genuinely golden, a color poets wrote about but rarely saw. The girl had a smile like a dangerous question. The first thing that struck Leo was how alive they looked. In contrast to the surroundings, they were bright and flushed.”

— Maureen Johnson

210. “He was usually her companion in avoiding things, but tonight he was letting her down. His fingers hadn’t stopped moving all night.”

— Maureen Johnson

211. “England and Britain and the United Kingdom are not the same thing. England is the country. Britain is the island containing England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is the formal designation of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as a political entity. If you mess this up, you will be corrected. Repeatedly.”

— Maureen Johnson

212. “It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.”

— Maureen Johnson

213. “Let it snow and snow and bury me. Very funny, Life.”

— Maureen Johnson

214. “It was feeling just beyond fear and somewhere to the left of sadness. Tired, but not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. It was dark and gloomy, and yet, it didn’t seem that things would get any better if the lights were turned up.”

— Maureen Johnson

215. “Three: Izzy made it sound like Stevie was Wikipedia Holmes, a walking, talking, deducing database that ate true crime and spat out justice.”

— Maureen Johnson

216. “We’re good at lying,” Sebastian said, leaning over and managing a smile. “We’ve been doing it for years.”

— Maureen Johnson

217. “English rain feels obligatory, like paperwork. It dampens already damn days and slicks the stones.”

— Maureen Johnson

218. “No one fixes the world alone.”

— Maureen Johnson

219. “But... he had had a long night, and it seemed a waste to force my story on him when he was half asleep.”

— Maureen Johnson

220. “We kind of wanted the going-out, shopping, prom-going type, and we got this weird, creepy one, and we love it but what is it talking about, ever? Sometimes Stevie felt bad for her parents. Their idea of what constituted interesting was so limited. They were never going to have as much fun as she did.”

— Maureen Johnson

221. “The regret and humiliation hurt much more than the cold.”

— Maureen Johnson

222. “His face shining with the kind of radiance usually associated with religious epiphany.”

— Maureen Johnson

223. “Paris seemed to make good on the promise it made in every photograph of it she’d ever seen.”

— Maureen Johnson

224. “Rise and shine, porcupines!”

— Maureen Johnson

225. “Department of Pain and the Processing Thereof.”

— Maureen Johnson

226. “I kind of love it,” Nate said, looking around. “It looks like the moisture farm that Luke Skywalker lives on.”

— Maureen Johnson

227. “Although it was very cold, he wore no coat. I think some English people think coats are for the weak.”

— Maureen Johnson

228. “They were poets – machine-gun poets who brooked no compromise, who rode any road they wished, who drove laughing into the sun.”

— Maureen Johnson

229. “This realization burned.”

— Maureen Johnson

230. “He still looked handsome. Not in the same way as Noah. Noah wasn’t flawless. He had no single amazing feature. Instead, he had a confluence of agreeable aspects that were accepted by one and all to add up to one very attractive whole, perfectly packaged in the right clothes.”

— Maureen Johnson

231. “Tyrants and those who ascribe to tyrannical beliefs are always weak at heart because they build their world on fear.”

— Maureen Johnson

232. “Campers screamed when they swam and played and sometimes simply for the sake of screaming.”

— Maureen Johnson

233. “David had, in fact, done the Sherlock thing that Stevie had dismissed for herself, specifically, the BBC one.”

— Maureen Johnson

234. “Felt the world swirling with snow.”

— Maureen Johnson

235. “Stevie quickly surmised that this was one of those cases where she sounded weird if she explained, but far more weird if she did not.”

— Maureen Johnson

236. “Office of Confusion and Panic.”

— Maureen Johnson

237. “I am out of ideas and need to conserve my energy so I can freak out more efficiently.”

— Maureen Johnson

238. “The idea that Izzy had a full life that didn’t revolve around David had somehow never occurred to Stevie. Love made her stupid.”

— Maureen Johnson

239. “Oh, I like it,” Nate said. “Snow makes it socially acceptable to stay in.”

— Maureen Johnson

240. “The jump from someone who can’t be found to someone who is missing is long and short at the same time, because nothing has changed except your perception of the distance.”

— Maureen Johnson

241. “Again, I noticed and again, I didn’t really care. But he did make more of an impact than the snow.”

— Maureen Johnson

242. “Once threw a mug of tea at a policeman.”

— Maureen Johnson

243. “I still have a whopping bad case of what you call scag magnetism. I thought i had gotten rid of it there, but it looks like scary guys still materialize from thin air in my presence. They are drawn to me. I am the North Pole, and they are the explorers of love.”

— Maureen Johnson

244. “I’m still going to eat a lot of tacos,” Nate said. “But I’m going to do it judgmentally.”

— Maureen Johnson

245. “Told her I would wait as long as it took. She told me not to bother, but I waited anyway.”

— Maureen Johnson

246. “Lie. It was such a gross word, with spikes on it. She was a liar. A fiendish thing.”

— Maureen Johnson

247. “It was as if the news itself wanted to reassure me. Even Jack the Ripper himself had reappeared as part of the greeting committee.”

— Maureen Johnson

248. “Murderers aren’t a type. They’re anyone.”

— Maureen Johnson

249. “If he hadn’t dragged me, I would never have made it up the hill.”

— Maureen Johnson

250. “But I was fuelled by the power of confusion and panic, which, like I said is always ready and waiting to get to work.”

— Maureen Johnson