Top 300 Maureen Johnson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Could you burn logs after a murder?”

— Maureen Johnson

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “Do guys really believe that if they are the only male in the area that girls will suddenly crawl on top of them? Like we scavenge for lone survivors and reward them with group make-out sessions?”

— Maureen Johnson

256. “And then the surface beneath us just went away.”

— Maureen Johnson

257. “It was a good brain, but it had only two modes – fog and frenzy.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

259. “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

260. “Didn’t say we tell each other everything.”

— Maureen Johnson

261. “Who the hell is she?” Nate asked Stevie quietly. “Why does she like us?” Stevie shrugged. “We’re likable?” “Not really,” he said. “We’re okay at best. Are all English people this friendly?”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

264. “Before the Smorgasbord, Noah Price was just a star in my sky... constant, familiar, bright and far above me.”

— Maureen Johnson

265. “My entrance brought a little light to his eyes.”

— Maureen Johnson

266. “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

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

— Maureen Johnson

268. “She never drank tea at home. Tea was for England.”

— Maureen Johnson

269. “They all seemed to have a deep, penetrating knowledge of everything going on in the world – politics, art, books, music. They all sounded so self-assured. That wasn’t surprising, considering that they were older and successful.”

— Maureen Johnson

270. “Much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t hide upstairs forever. Sooner or later, I was going to have to come down and face the world.”

— Maureen Johnson

271. “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

272. “I always had a thing about mushrooms. They’re the odd little children of the forest. I suppose I related.”

— Maureen Johnson

273. “Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbors Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.”

— Maureen Johnson

274. “It was all so crazy... as weird as finding out that someone had written a book about my life or something.”

— Maureen Johnson

275. “WHEN things are bad, give yourself a point for everything.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “But this was not the time to be picky.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

283. “They’re English,” David said, sitting on the bed. “That keep calm and carry on thing is real. You know. Don’t talk about stuff that’s bad. Talk about tennis! That’s how they are.”

— Maureen Johnson

284. “The surefire way to get someone to tell you something you want to know isn’t to ask them about it. What you do is start telling the story yourself, say what you think happened, and say it wrong. People may not want to discuss things, but they will correct you, every time.”

— Maureen Johnson

285. “Things around here have deviated from the usual.”

— Maureen Johnson

286. “The more I looked, the more Christmasy it got.”

— Maureen Johnson

287. “Is there kissing?” she asked. “I hate you.” “You can’t write anything?” “Let’s just say that I needed to have Moonbeam fight something and the only thing I could come up with was called the Pulsating Norb. It’s like a wall that jiggles.”

— Maureen Johnson

288. “I had always assumed the weekend was a holy tradition, respected by good people everywhere. Not so at Wexford.”

— Maureen Johnson

289. “Stevie had no fears of the dead. The living, however, sometimes gave her the creeps.”

— Maureen Johnson

290. “I wish I’d remembered not to use it around other people, because it was kind of our word.”

— Maureen Johnson

291. “Stevie was not one of those people who thought fate decided for her. Fate was making choices. Fate was at least trying.”

— Maureen Johnson

292. “To her, majoring in painting was an act of insanity akin to majoring in photocopying or reheating leftovers.”

— Maureen Johnson

293. “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

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

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

296. “Some guys surprise you like that.”

— Maureen Johnson

297. “One of the things that made Nate and Stevie such good friends was their mutual hatred of sharing emotional things. Somehow, they managed to have a deeper bond by staying on the surface – as if they were snorkeling their feelings, floating along side by side, observing all of nature’s wonders without getting close enough to be stung by something under a rock.”

— Maureen Johnson

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

— Maureen Johnson

299. “Nate would tolerate most things for about an hour if he knew there was the promise of a snack and the chance to be left alone in the near future.”

— Maureen Johnson

300. “Hello, Alice,” Stevie said. “It’d okay. It’s over.”

— Maureen Johnson