Top 50 Melanie Benjamin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn’t planned.”

— Melanie Benjamin

2. “But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.”

— Melanie Benjamin

3. “I suppose at some point, we all have to decide which memories – real or otherwise – to hold on to, and which ones to let go.”

— Melanie Benjamin

4. “I like to imagine the “what ifs” of history.”

— Melanie Benjamin

5. “There is always so much talk about the sins of the fathers but it is the sins of the mothers that are the most difficult to avoid repeating.”

— Melanie Benjamin

6. “I am not your friend, not your doll, not your playmate. I am your teacher and will expect every consideration, every show of respect, that my position demands.”

— Melanie Benjamin

7. “The Great Plains were immense enough to inspire the grandest, most foolish of dreams – but they were also vast enough that no one could ever explore every corner.”

— Melanie Benjamin

8. “Sorrow was my constant companion, even though I no longer wept. It was the shadow that followed me on sunny days, the weight pressing down upon my spirits on cloudy ones.”

— Melanie Benjamin

9. “People do that, of course – they come into your life, illuminate some dark corner you’d not even known was there, then they disappear. True connection is rare, but that’s just the way it is.”

— Melanie Benjamin

10. “Why were there so many barriers between us, always? Barriers of clothing, of etiquette, of time and age and reason.”

— Melanie Benjamin

11. “What very mysterious things days were. Sometimes they fly by, and other times they seem to last forever, yet they are all exactly twenty-four hours. There’s quite a lot we don’t know about them.”

— Melanie Benjamin

12. “It is devastating to see a loved one suffer; it is harder to bear than your own pain. Love is despair, love is delight. Love is fear, love is hope. Love is mercy. Love is anger.”

— Melanie Benjamin

13. “God, it was tiring, wasn’t it, how these things took roost and never, ever left? Like squatters. Yes. The traumas of childhood were like squatters. They took advantage of negligence, weakness, until the point where you couldn’t imagine your life being whole without them.”

— Melanie Benjamin

14. “I see things beyond what other people see. I am always looking for hidden corners and closets of a life that I feel aren’t explored either by the person who lived it or the people writing about it.”

— Melanie Benjamin

15. “Babe Paley simply never made an empty gesture, and here she was, assembling a parade of them. But her feet, her hands, her mind, her heart, were all restless. Truman.”

— Melanie Benjamin

16. “How does one know that, before the first hello? It’s a heaviness in the air combined with a lightness of step. It’s a slowing down of the past, and a speeding up of the future.”

— Melanie Benjamin

17. “The girls we’d believed to have been lost in the haze of regret and recrimination that comes with surviving in the unscrupulous business; this unjust world. But it turned out they’d been here all along, these two; caught forever in a shared moment, preserved together in a silver frame.”

— Melanie Benjamin

18. “Why, then, did I always feel as if his happiness was my responsibility? It wasn’t fair for him to burden me with that. It had never been fair.”

— Melanie Benjamin

19. “I had wanted to live forever as a gypsy girl; I had wanted to live forever as a child, tumbling down a rabbit hole. I had been granted both wishes, only to find immortality was not what it had promised to be; instead of a passport to the future, it was a yoke that bound me to the past.”

— Melanie Benjamin

20. “Wonderland was all we had in common, after all; Wonderland was what was denied the two of us. I had denied him his; he had denied me mine.”

— Melanie Benjamin

21. “He appreciated it, to a point. He also had no intention of having a second marriage like his first, a marriage in which the wife taught the husband, and didn’t care who knew it; in fact, took pains to let others see how much she had taught him, how much more she knew about art and politics and all the rest. That had been Dorothy Hearst Paley’s fatal flaw, one she recognized too late. Babe.”

— Melanie Benjamin

22. “My dear, simple little sister! Every mood so fleeting, yet so obvious; there was no mystery to Minnie, none at all. She loved whom she knew, distrusted everyone else, and shared her emotions, her thoughts, as freely as they occurred to her.”

— Melanie Benjamin

23. “Oh, don’t blame your wife! You’re a man, you could have come. But she was right, you should have thought of your family in the first place. I should have, too. I won’t be so silly – so selfish – again. I don’t need you to rescue me anymore, Gunner, and I don’t think I ever really did.”

— Melanie Benjamin

24. “I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.”

— Melanie Benjamin

25. “I did not want to be forgotten. More than that, I wanted, desperately – I fell to my knees and began to tear out the weeds, the vines, by their very roots – to be remembered.”

— Melanie Benjamin

26. “Unlike men, women got less sentimental as we aged, I was discovering.”

— Melanie Benjamin

27. “Who was this woman before me, her face imprinted with the expectations of others? I was Mom. I was Wife. I was Tragedy. I was Pilot. They all were me, and I, them. That was a fate we could not escape, we women; we would always be called upon by others in a way men simply never were. But weren’t we always, first and foremost – woman? Wasn’t there strength in that, victory, clarity – in all the stages of a woman’s life?”

— Melanie Benjamin

28. “It was her style, that indefinable asset. It was said that the others had style but Babe was style.”

— Melanie Benjamin

29. “Sit up straight.” “Don’t fidget.” “Write a thank-you note the minute you receive a gift or return home from a party.” “Always have fresh flowers, no matter the cost.” “Clean gloves and shoes are the sign of a lady.” “Never let the help get the upper hand.” “Be discreet.” “Be above gossip.”

— Melanie Benjamin

30. “The swans swam ahead, always ahead, their bodies gliding so that none could see the effort of their feet beneath the surface, paddling, moving, propelling them forward, forward, to that beautiful spot far ahead, an incandescent curtain of light, a shower of moonbeams, a heavenly constellation of stars.”

— Melanie Benjamin

31. “People get tired of constant bad news, they shut it out after a while, become immune to it.”

— Melanie Benjamin

32. “My head grew muddled with it all; the silly ways adults acted with one another, never saying what they meant, trusting in sighs and glances and distance to speak for them instead. How dangerous that was! How easy it must be to misinterpret a sigh or a look.”

— Melanie Benjamin

33. “For despite the pain of loss, as time went on, the memory of those I’d loved warmed my heart more than grieved it.”

— Melanie Benjamin

34. “No, this was the career I wanted; a writer could be employed for as long as she could hold a pencil; for as long as her mind still held out. But an actress – even an actress like Mary – had a fleeting shelf life.”

— Melanie Benjamin

35. “Perhaps he simply needs to mark their existence by noting their absence.”

— Melanie Benjamin

36. “They are in danger of becoming immune to the horrors surrounding them. This is what an occupation does – it wears you down until you accept evil. Until you can no longer fully define it, even. Let alone recognize it.”

— Melanie Benjamin

37. “Most readers of historical fiction are content to just get caught up in a good story, and that is what I want to do as an author. I am not concerned with people knowing exactly what I made up and what is real.”

— Melanie Benjamin

38. “We remembered these identical experiences differently – but that didn’t make them any less truthful.”

— Melanie Benjamin

39. “And that was, finally, why I loved him – because he never complained when I had a headache or changed my mind about something. He never shut down when I revealed my fears, my worries. He never tried to make me feel less, weaker, than he was – because he shared his own emotions with me, as well.”

— Melanie Benjamin

40. “Marriage is not defined by what we hope to gain, but by what we are willing to sacrifice.”

— Melanie Benjamin

41. “His death notice included the mention that in 1880, he had married Alice in Wonderland. I like to think he would have been pleased at that, but the truth is he was the only one to whom this didn’t matter at all.”

— Melanie Benjamin

42. “Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead, I would define it. My size may have been the first thing people noticed about me but never, I vowed at that moment, would it be the last.”

— Melanie Benjamin

43. “Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead I would define it.”

— Melanie Benjamin

44. “I certainly incorporate facts into my fiction. I take the basic facts from the life of my subject and I pick and choose what to use to construct a really interesting novel. I don’t let facts get in the way of my imagination and my exploration of the subject’s emotions and relationships.”

— Melanie Benjamin

45. “For the first time, she understood that conversations didn’t always bring about resolution. That people – all people – carried around inside them notions and thoughts and sadness that could not be alleviated simply by talking about them.”

— Melanie Benjamin

46. “Now there were no more stories to tell, to soothe, to comfort, to draw strangers close together; to link like hearts and minds.”

— Melanie Benjamin

47. “Because to him, she was just a silly girl to whom he could do whatever he wanted. Because to him, she was a plaything. There was nothing noble in his devotion. It was vanity – she was a mirror, reassuring him that he was a man who could make a young girl lose her head. A reminder that as a man, he could take whatever he wanted.”

— Melanie Benjamin

48. “But as soon as he felt the first blast of ice slap his unprotected face, Gavin thought, once more, of that girl. How many ways could he come up with to describe what happened when young, hopeful – yearning – women were frozen to death out on the prairie? Gavin looked up at the sky, hoping, to his own surprise, to see a break in the clouds, a glimpse of a fading sun. But no such break occurred.”

— Melanie Benjamin

49. “And he began to comprehend, then, how murky it all was going to be; how many choices Parisians were going to have to make on a daily basis, questions they would have to ask themselves that had no correct answers. Yet if you blundered, if you made the wrong choice, you would likely be thrown in prison for a few days. Or worse. And if you made what appeared to be the right decision for now, how would you be held accountable for it in the future?”

— Melanie Benjamin

50. “The blizzard, created when an enormous trough of cold air rushing in from the Arctic had met up with an equally enormous influx of warm, wet air from the gulf, gobbled up everything in its path. The collision generated a force of energy no one could remember seeing in their lifetimes, but that all would talk about with wonder until the day they died.”

— Melanie Benjamin