Top 40 Megan Nolan Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain. It was binding yourself and feeling good when the bandages came off, it was cutting a hole in your leg so it could feel it heal. I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could consider good. I made it so that suffering was a kind of work.”

— Megan Nolan

2. “It was already so near to impossible to say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy.”

— Megan Nolan

3. “There is no better feeling to me than to wake up in the middle of the night and thrust my hand out and say, half in a dream still, ‘I love you so much,’ and for a person to turn towards me from muscle memory and say through their own sleep, ‘I love you too.’ There’s never been a drug or a friend or a food that’s even come close.”

— Megan Nolan

4. “For me, food was messier, more complex. It was stressful, yes, but could be joyful too, something to binge on, and then shy away from; something to wrestle with, and offer up, and bury.”

— Megan Nolan

5. “It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do.”

— Megan Nolan

6. “I turned my face to the side and stared out my window. I was filled not only with misery about what he was saying, and his awareness of it, but also with shame at how squalidly I was wasting my short life. I was sitting in a car with someone who loved me more than life itself, and yet all I could think about was Ciaran. How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.”

— Megan Nolan

7. “You could tell these nights before they had started usually, some air of mischief in the room when we began to drink. We threw back the first drinks, greedily anticipating the coming looseness and hysteria. There were things we had expected to have by now that we did not have.”

— Megan Nolan

8. “I made mistakes like this all the time, seeking affirmation from the very worst people, so that what I must have been after deep down was confirmation of the fears instead of their dismissals.”

— Megan Nolan

9. “I wondered how they always knew that I was someone to be hurt. Even when I didn’t tell them to, they knew somehow that there was part of me that accepted or desired it.”

— Megan Nolan

10. “What must it feel like to be beautiful but also invisible whenever you choose to be? To be a beautiful man?”

— Megan Nolan

11. “You can’t complain about feeling bad, about being depressed, if you aren’t trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to care about yourself.”

— Megan Nolan

12. “I envy women who are removed. I never really had that luxury.”

— Megan Nolan

13. “Living alone, I began to split apart from myself in a deeper and more grotesque way than ever before.”

— Megan Nolan

14. “To demand ownership of a woman who doesn’t love you, even when she is dead. To take that dead body and make it yours through hideous force, hideous care, hideous attention. It seemed to sum up all the ways in which men could take you without your permission and turn you into something you had never been, which had nothing to do with you.”

— Megan Nolan

15. “Was I feeling something true from within myself, or was I living out a fantasy I had assembled?”

— Megan Nolan

16. “I missed whole days huddling in my bed, scrolling through my phone without pleasure or intent, locked into its repetition as a safeguard.”

— Megan Nolan

17. “I didn’t want her near me, because she was the only one able to see me for what I was, but I couldn’t lose her for the very same reason.”

— Megan Nolan

18. “They weren’t star-crossed, just dithering, dependant people who couldn’t stay away from each other because they hadn’t worked out how to imagine anything different.”

— Megan Nolan

19. “I pleaded with him to see how small I really was. I said through my huddling and hiding that I was nothing, and I was happy to be nothing if nothing was what pleased him best.”

— Megan Nolan

20. “What I was feeling was the failure of superstition and charms – the unreliability of prayer.”

— Megan Nolan

21. “It was a sight which taught me that a woman’s nudity was not always erotic, not even always pleasant, was, indeed, at times pathetic to behold.”

— Megan Nolan

22. “In these moments I knew that if I could be smaller, smaller, less and less, if I could be tided, then he would love me fully and properly; and that anybody – oh everybody – would.”

— Megan Nolan

23. “Living with him forced me to treat myself like a person in a way I was not able to alone.”

— Megan Nolan

24. “I was not without value, but the value I held was not the kind I wanted to hold, and I did not know how to exchange it.”

— Megan Nolan

25. “I couldn’t spend a day, much less a series of years, without looking around me for someone to feel things about.”

— Megan Nolan

26. “I was also so frightened of him and what he did to me that I could never admit this decision, inwardly or to him.”

— Megan Nolan

27. “And that’s something to recommend love: that is has clear rules like a game, and it has speeches and sayings you’ll have heard in films and in songs. There are patterns and there are steps to be taken. If you lose the game that’s one thing, and that has to be dealt with, but at least there is a game to be played at all.”

— Megan Nolan

28. “You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it’s uniquely awful.”

— Megan Nolan

29. “And after all, what individual had I been before? What identity was there to erase with my newfound house-pride? I had never found one resilient enough to live on in my memory once it had gone. There had never been one real enough to miss. I disappeared with perfect peace.”

— Megan Nolan

30. “I could not be alone happily, and because I knew this was a sign of weakness, I forced myself to endure it for as long as I could before breaking, although I sometimes thought I would go mad.”

— Megan Nolan

31. “That the pain was private made it better – I made them torture me, without their consent.”

— Megan Nolan

32. “I had carefully created a circumstance in which a kind of love could be bred in him, like a scientist manipulating lab conditions.”

— Megan Nolan

33. “She loved the feeling of doing something on her own, and doing it in a routine. It felt thrillingly adult and affirmed her most cherished hope, the hope that she might have an actual inner life of substance and note.”

— Megan Nolan

34. “I hate now for men to dote in this way, the ones who don’t know me. Their praise lands uncertainly in the air somewhere between the two of us, because it doesn’t belong to me. I hate to hear them tell me what I am, even or especially when what they think I am is kind or brilliant or beautiful. I hate when they insist that I have no faults, that my laziness or violence or cruelty simply don’t exist... I am being made to wear whatever particular fantasy they wish to project.”

— Megan Nolan

35. “She had promised to stop denying the truth, to strive always to confront things as they were no matter how much it hurt, but she felt that this was one area an exception could be made. To stand in these rooms and believe however briefly that death was a thing which happened only in a foreign country, and could not follow you home.”

— Megan Nolan

36. “There is no secret, Tom, or else there are hundreds of them, and none of them interesting enough for you. The secret is that we’re a family, we’re just an ordinary family, with ordinary unhappiness like yours.”

— Megan Nolan

37. “Really, who would care about a family like theirs? Theirs were ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note.”

— Megan Nolan

38. “I would always look like a misshapen version of my True Self, a hastily sketched approximation of a human being.”

— Megan Nolan

39. “How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.”

— Megan Nolan

40. “But still, they tried. The trying would be the life’s work, they both understood this, and there would be no day when they would celebrate a resolution.”

— Megan Nolan

41. “The first night I moved in, I sat in my bed after unpacking and looked around at the ephemera and trinkets. They were drawings and notes from old lovers and friends, postcards, photographs, porcelain figures, antique ashtrays. I needed these things, fixed them as soon as I arrived somewhere new, but now I was alone they seemed foolish. They looked like props for a bad theatre production, trying to summon up a personality where there was none.”

— Megan Nolan

42. “There were other things than beauty which could be undeniable, solid gifts of service, and they helped to temper her embarrassment for existing.”

— Megan Nolan

43. “Always, Rose had fixated on her own usefulness. It was a part of the urge she had to apologise for not being fully beautiful.”

— Megan Nolan

44. “I felt crushed with the certainty that i was the crazy one.”

— Megan Nolan

45. “I wished I could unburden myself but I couldn’t verbalise what was happening because doing so would bring it into existence. So far, it was all taking place in my head with no verification from an outside party, and so long as I kept it that way I could suppress it.”

— Megan Nolan