Top 50 Meg Mason Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.”

— Meg Mason

2. “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. usually on their own.”

— Meg Mason

3. “Short of another, beauty is a reason to live.”

— Meg Mason

4. “But the thing about labels is, they’re very useful when they’re right because,’ I carried on through her attempt at interruption, ’because then you don’t give yourself wrong ones, like difficult or insane, or psychotic or a bad wife.”

— Meg Mason

5. “Looking back, it is unlikely our mother knew them either – the object of her parties seemed to be filling the house with extraordinary strangers and being extraordinary in front of them, and not a person who used to live above a key-cutter. It was not enough to be extraordinary to the three of us.”

— Meg Mason

6. “My perception of Winsome belonged to my mother – I thought of her as old, punctilious, someone without an interior life or worthwhile passions. That was the first time I saw her for myself. Winsome was an adult, someone who took care, who loved order and beauty and labored to create it as a gift to other people. She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and smiled. She was still wearing her wet apron.”

— Meg Mason

7. “And I wonder, is there any way you could come to see that what you’ve been through is for something? Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else?”

— Meg Mason

8. “Normal people say, I can’t imagine feeling so bad I’d genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn’t that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling a tiredness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.”

— Meg Mason

9. “I was the victim, and victims of course are allowed to behave however they like.”

— Meg Mason

10. “Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?”

— Meg Mason

11. “Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.”

— Meg Mason

12. “Martha, why did you label every single box Miscellaneous?”

— Meg Mason

13. “You were done being hopeless.”

— Meg Mason

14. “It is hard to look into someone’s eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through. In some way, found out. But, for as long as the kiss had lasted, I didn’t feel guilty for being so happy, when I had just taken something away from Patrick so that I could have what I wanted.”

— Meg Mason

15. “There isn’t a name for the emotion that registered on his face then. It was all of them.”

— Meg Mason

16. “My mother was beginning to describe herself as a conscientious objector where domestic matters were concerned.”

— Meg Mason

17. “Dose a person need to be physically bleeding for you to comprehend they’re not well?”

— Meg Mason

18. “Peregrine put his palms on the table. He said Paris, Martha. “Please go to Paris.” “Why?” “Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is vastly better than crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.”

— Meg Mason

19. “Two things that when you put them together in a poem make the reader feel whatever emotion you want them to so you don’t have to expressly name it. As in, if you write slag heap it saves you the job of typing morbid existential despair.”

— Meg Mason

20. “After that, Nicholas got up, stretched, and told me I could have his spot because he just remembered a girl he need to make amends with because his final act before rehab was putting a nine iron through her windscreen after taking more than his recommended daily intake of methamphetamine. ‘Which I discover is non. Back shortly.”

— Meg Mason

21. “First novels are autobiography and wish fulfilment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.”

— Meg Mason

22. “At night I read until I feel asleep and wherever I was, every time somebody in a book wanted something, I wrote down what it was. Once I had finished them all, I had so many torn-off bits of paper, collected in a jar on Ingrid’s dressed. But they all said, a person, a family, a home, money, to not be alone. That is all anybody wants.”

— Meg Mason

23. “I was below the surface for only a second but I thought I was already drowning. I did not think I could swim back but I was only ever feet away from the edge. It was just the pain of the water.”

— Meg Mason

24. “What happens next is your choice.”

— Meg Mason

25. “I snatched up the papers and reminded him that it had been his idea. “But yes, thank God you didn’t manage to get me pregnant, Jonathan. A baby I didn’t want in the first place turning out to have a genetic predilection for cocaine and white jeans.” I left before he could say anything else.”

— Meg Mason

26. “Patrick crouched beside my chair, holding the armrest, and moved my hair. He asked me if I felt like I should go in, just for a bit. He said it was up to me. I said no thank you. I had always been too afraid to be among those people in case they didn’t think it was weird I was there. In case the doctors wouldn’t let me go. I wanted Patrick to grab me by the wrists and drag me there so that I did not have to decide. I wanted him not to believe me when I said it was fine.”

— Meg Mason

27. “I am not being whimsical, Martha. Short another, beauty is a reason to live.”

— Meg Mason

28. “Ideally, Martha, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.”

— Meg Mason

29. “No marriage makes sense. Especially not to the outside world. A marriage is its own world.”

— Meg Mason

30. “I know you and your sister tease me for the repurposing but all I’ve been trying to do, all these years, is take rubbish and turn it into something beautiful and much stronger than it was before. I’m sorry if that’s a bloody metaphor for everything.”

— Meg Mason

31. “There are things, crimes in a marriage, that are so great you cannot apologize for them. Instead, watching television on the sofa, eating the dinner he made while you showered after the hospital, you say, Patrick? Yes. I like this sauce.”

— Meg Mason

32. “I am not saying you haven’t suffered, Martha. But I am saying, grow up. You’re not the only one.”

— Meg Mason

33. “I know it hasn’t been that long but this is what I have been able to see since then: things do happen. Terrible things. The only thing any of us get to do is decide whether they happen to us or if, at least in part, they happen for us.”

— Meg Mason

34. “The great revelation perhaps never did come, instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.′ He finishes. Isn’t that brilliant girls? It’s -.”

— Meg Mason

35. “You decided that because I don’t provide a continuous emotional commentary and describe every single feeling I have as it’s occurring that I don’t feel anything. You told me I was blank. Do you remember? You said I was just the outline of where a husband should be.”

— Meg Mason

36. “It is hard to look into someone’s eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through.”

— Meg Mason

37. “I slid Ingrid’s journal out of the bag and wrote the caption out on the first page, then glanced quickly over my shoulder in case I had been seen. But I was the only person who would judge a woman who was sitting by herself in a shopping centre bakery on a weekday morning, when her running clothes and her gratitude journal testified to an effort to improve herself on two fronts.”

— Meg Mason

38. “It used to be a joke between us, that in everything I swing between extremes and he lives his entire life on the middle setting.”

— Meg Mason

39. “I chose one that was inexplicably thick, with twice as many pages as its shelf mates, because it said, on the cover, You Should Just Go For It. It was meant to sound carefree and motivating but for want of an exclamation mark, it came across as weary and resigned. You Should Just Go For It. Everyone Is Sick Of Hearing You Talk About It. Follow Your Dreams. The Stakes Could Not Be Lower.”

— Meg Mason

40. “Is this your fist time with lying, Patrick? You’re not very good at it. Seriously, why didn’t you go with Oliver?”

— Meg Mason

41. “What was the point? It was bloody long.” “Oliver, shut up. I don’t know.” She flicked her hair. “Just that feeling of like, thank God when you see that person. Martha, do you know what I’m talking about?” I said yes. Thank God is how I felt when I saw Patrick that day. Not a thrill or affection or pleasure. Visceral relief.”

— Meg Mason

42. “Suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gest to choose is the backdrop.”

— Meg Mason

43. “Once I had finished them all, I had so many torn-off bits of paper, collected in a jar on Ingrid’s dresser. But they all said, a person, a family, a home, money, to not be alone. That is all anybody wants.”

— Meg Mason

44. “I’m glad.” I said, “That she’s not going to give up ham?” “That you’re unpleasantly superior.” He meant, since it is why you are still alive. Probably, it is not the worst thing I have ever thought. But is in the top one hundred.”

— Meg Mason

45. “I knew she was going to marry him because although he was beside her all night, he did not challenge her on a single point of any anecdote while she was telling it, even though my sister’s anecdotes are always a three-way combination of hyperbole, lies and factual inaccuracy.”

— Meg Mason

46. “As a child, watching the news or listening to it on the radio with my father I thought, when they said ‘the body was discovered by a man walking his dog’, that it was always the same man. I still imagine him, putting his walking shoes on at the door, finding the leash, the familiar dread as he clips it onto the dog’s collar, but still setting out, regardless, in the hope that, today, there won’t be a body. But twenty minutes later, God, there it is.”

— Meg Mason

47. “We hugged each other like two people who had no practical experience of embracing, had only taught themselves the theory from a poorly worded manual.”

— Meg Mason

48. “There are things, crimes in a marriage, that are so great you can not apologize for them.”

— Meg Mason

49. “In the beginning, I told strangers I couldn’t have children because I thought it would stop them from continuing beyond their initial inquiry. It is better to say you don’t wnat them. Then they know straightaway that there is something wrong with you, just not in a medical sense.”

— Meg Mason

50. “At home, at parties, our mother’s drinking had always been a source of amusement to us. It was becoming less so now that we were older, and she was older, and her drinking was no longer dependent on there being interesting people in the house or any people at all. And it had never been amusing at Belgravia, where my uncle and aunt drank in a way that did not produce a change in mood, and Ingrid and I learned that bottles could be recorked and put away and glasses left on the table unfinished.”

— Meg Mason