Top 280 Maureen Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “If he hadn’t dragged me, I would never have made it up the hill.”

— Maureen Johnson

252. “The sky was white instead of the crazy pink of the night before.”

— Maureen Johnson

253. “Nothing is longer than a little while.”

— Maureen Johnson

254. “Stevie had never put these Stevies together to assemble a portrait of herself – her choices had not been failures. They had been choices. It was all one Stevie, and that Stevie was worthwhile.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

256. “Endless white ground below, and swirling flakes, and a lonely whistle of wind, and the shadow of houses.”

— Maureen Johnson

257. “This realization burned.”

— Maureen Johnson

258. “No one gets Paris after one visit. No one.”

— Maureen Johnson

259. “In English Murder Villages, vats exist for the express purpose of drowning people – in beer, in pickling brine, in whiskey, in jam. This is doubly true if the vat was built by fourteenth-century monks.”

— Maureen Johnson

260. “Stevie packed like someone who just heard that reports of the monster were true, and it was headed toward the city.”

— Maureen Johnson

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “Good resume,” he said, not sounding all that impressed. “But what’s he like?” Oh, God. This conversation was going to go on.”

— Maureen Johnson

265. “Rise and shine, porcupines!”

— Maureen Johnson

266. “I have never, ever been so happy to see a house.”

— Maureen Johnson

267. “Who had just witnessed me go through an entire rainbow of emotions and experiences.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

269. “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

270. “The full truth was a little too much to throw at a stranger.”

— Maureen Johnson

271. “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

272. “Sometimes anxiety did that – it could slow you down or speed you up.”

— Maureen Johnson

273. “Villagers love to remember the glorious old days, when they used to skewer one another with sticks, fire muskets into one another’s faces, and cut off their neighbors’ heads in the name of king or country or whatever they were into back then.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

275. “He was paying attention. It felt foreign, a little embarrassingly intimate, but kind of great. My eyes filled up.”

— Maureen Johnson

276. “God,” I said. “Why are all guys so easy like that?”

— Maureen Johnson

277. “Debbie was one of those parents who still hadn’t quite grasped that using the internet was not exactly wizardry, and that we could all find anything online.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

280. “The truth was that she had managed to betray everyone by doing nothing. No one in history had ever done less and yet been so wrong. Not cheating on a non-boyfriend with the non-boyfriend of a friend. The pressure of thinking that one through made her swollen body ache.”

— Maureen Johnson

281. “My grandparents are great people, but they are easily rattled. Like, if the grocery store sells out of some frozen pizza or soup they advertise in the circular, and they’ve gone to the store just for that, they’ll stand there debating their next move for a half an hour.”

— Maureen Johnson

282. “I had no idea why I was saying this. It just seemed like telling the truth would mean admitting some weaknesses.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

284. “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

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

— Maureen Johnson

286. “Gators are just something you have to accept where I come from. Most don’t go anywhere near the houses, even though there are lots of delicious children and dogs there. Every once in a while, though, an alligator has a lightbulb moment and decides to take a stroll and see the world a bit.”

— Maureen Johnson

287. “She’s like the Hulk,” Nate explained. “But instead of transforming when she gets mad, it’s when she sees crafts. And she doesn’t turn big and green. She just makes crafts. So not like the Hulk, really.”

— Maureen Johnson

288. “It is so cold. So cold that the Department of Temperature Acknowledgment and Regulation in your brain gets the readings and says, “I can’t deal with this. I’m out of here.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

290. “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