Top 80 Meg Rosoff Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I don’t get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”

— Meg Rosoff

2. “When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they’re standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.”

— Meg Rosoff

3. “Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.”

— Meg Rosoff

4. “The imagination can be dangerous. It can change the world. And that is why we write.”

— Meg Rosoff

5. “My daughter is a fantastic travelling companion – she’s totally organised, whereas I’m hopeless.”

— Meg Rosoff

6. “The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever youre trying to tell them.”

— Meg Rosoff

7. “Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.”

— Meg Rosoff

8. “Fighting back is what I’ve discovered I do best.”

— Meg Rosoff

9. “Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place – from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.”

— Meg Rosoff

10. “Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.”

— Meg Rosoff

11. “After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that’s how I live now.”

— Meg Rosoff

12. “A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.”

— Meg Rosoff

13. “The things that break your heart when you think there’s nothing left to break.”

— Meg Rosoff

14. “After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.”

— Meg Rosoff

15. “Fate is trying to kill me. I miss my dog. What’s a doctor going to say? You’re not ill, you’re mad as a muffin? They’ll either lock me up or tell me to get a grip and no one will believe the truth anyway.”

— Meg Rosoff

16. “Every war has turning points and every person too.”

— Meg Rosoff

17. “Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.”

— Meg Rosoff

18. “If you haven’t been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is no time at all.”

— Meg Rosoff

19. “I noticed that once you realize someone’s watching you it’s pretty hard not to find yourself watching them back.”

— Meg Rosoff

20. “I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn’t love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I didn’t have to howl all night.”

— Meg Rosoff

21. “I was coming around to the belief that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.”

— Meg Rosoff

22. “At the time, I didn’t have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I’m older I’ve seen how little it takes to turn a person’s life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an Idea. Another person. An idea of a person.”

— Meg Rosoff

23. “If there was ever a more perfect day in the history of time it isn’t one I’ve heard about.”

— Meg Rosoff

24. “I will not always be happy, but perhaps, if I’m lucky, I will be spared the agony of adding pain to the world.”

— Meg Rosoff

25. “Puedo ver que las relaciones pasadas dejan un destello a su paso, una estela de luz irregular que no desaparece cuando la gente se separa.”

— Meg Rosoff

26. “Staying alive was what we did to pass the time.”

— Meg Rosoff

27. “I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the world that night but it wasn’t one that could touch us.”

— Meg Rosoff

28. “Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.”

— Meg Rosoff

29. “The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn’t know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.”

— Meg Rosoff

30. “I can’t even trust my own imaginary dog. How much lower can a person get?”

— Meg Rosoff

31. “How doe we define the energy of thought versus the energy of action.”

— Meg Rosoff

32. “It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.”

— Meg Rosoff

33. “The soldier had stamped my passport FAMILY in heavy black capital letters and I checked it now for reassurance and because I liked how fierce the word looked.”

— Meg Rosoff

34. “The real truth is that the war didn’t have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop.”

— Meg Rosoff

35. “While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps.”

— Meg Rosoff

36. “It’s a strange sensation to live inside another person’s life, to wonder all the time what he is doing, or thinking or feeling.”

— Meg Rosoff

37. “Bob exploded. ‘There is no such thing as a casual conversation with my mother. Every single word will be twisted recognition until before you know it you’re playing Russian roulette in a wind tunnel with a psychotic dwarf, having wagered your birthright for a piece of cheese...”

— Meg Rosoff

38. “Accept love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions.”

— Meg Rosoff

39. “I give thanks for all that has passed, for all that is passing, and for all that is yet to come.”

— Meg Rosoff

40. “Pouring breakfast cereal into a bowl, he saw his life crashing down in smoking ruins.”

— Meg Rosoff

41. “I didn’t seem to have that effect on anyone but it would have been a waste for both of us to be saints.”

— Meg Rosoff

42. “To cheer us up on our first day on the road I made jam sandwiches for breakfast and they tasted hopeful.”

— Meg Rosoff

43. “I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present.”

— Meg Rosoff

44. “She accepted the permission bestowed by passion to live entirely in the present.”

— Meg Rosoff

45. “And after awhile of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving for Edmond. And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.”

— Meg Rosoff

46. “There he lay spooked, a spinning wheel in a celestial bowling alley.”

— Meg Rosoff

47. “The open road. What a trio of words. What a vision of blue sky and untouched hills and narrow trails heading God knew where and being free – free and hungry, free and cold, free and wet, free and lost. Who could mourn such conditions, faced with the alternative?”

— Meg Rosoff

48. “Such a courageous boy I was. To act brazenly under scrutiny and risk further injury to my wounded heart. Ah, the resilience, the blind, dumb persistence of youth.”

— Meg Rosoff

49. “When I finally got to sleep I found Edmond and told him everything that happened, and he stayed with me for hours and whether I was dreaming or just borderline schizophrenic I didn’t know and didn’t care either. At.”

— Meg Rosoff

50. “I was pretty far gone, but not so far gone that I thought anyone with half a toehold in reality would think what we were doing was a good idea.”

— Meg Rosoff