Top 80 Melissa Albert Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everything I needed to say to her expanding like helium in my chest.”

— Melissa Albert

2. “We were each our own island, gathered together into one messed-up archipelago.”

— Melissa Albert

3. “Life was a big thing to live without a map.”

— Melissa Albert

4. “When in doubt, the answer is always Death. With a capital D.”

— Melissa Albert

5. “I made my way here alone for a long while. It took some time to find my place. It took more time to become somebody worth protecting.”

— Melissa Albert

6. “Life never turns out how you imagine it will when you’re young. Everything is smaller than you think, or too big. It all smells a little funny and fits like somebody else’s shirt.”

— Melissa Albert

7. “Look until the leaves turn red, sew the worlds up with thread. If your journey’s left undone, fear the rising of the sun.”

— Melissa Albert

8. “Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn’t have and secrets you kept or couldn’t and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed-together detritus that becomes what you call your life.”

— Melissa Albert

9. “You’re a story, but that doesn’t make you any less true.”

— Melissa Albert

10. “She talked like a woman who knew more books than people.”

— Melissa Albert

11. “I wanted my mom, in a way you maybe can’t ever want anyone else. It was primal and sharp and it made me feel like a needle in the haystack of a cold and terrible world. I wanted my mom.”

— Melissa Albert

12. “Every time we left a place, I felt the things that happened there being wiped clean, till all that was left was Ella, our fights and our talks and our winding roads. I wrote down dates and places in the corners of my books, and lost them along the way.”

— Melissa Albert

13. “My own shadow gave the distinct impression of keeping up with me just to see what I’d do next;.”

— Melissa Albert

14. “Breathe in the light, Alice. Breathe out the anger.”

— Melissa Albert

15. “The quickest way to end this is to begin it, and that’s no way to start, is it?”

— Melissa Albert

16. “And while they’re being told, stories create the energy that makes this world go. They keep our stars in place. They make our grass grow.”

— Melissa Albert

17. “You might think it’s strange, but you get used to those karmic moments in the book business. Books want to be read, and by the right people. There’s nothing surprising in it, not to me.”

— Melissa Albert

18. “I walked a block on rubbery knees, feeling the way I did the time a van clipped my bike and sent me reeling into a line of parked cars. Ella had dropped her cigarette and jumped on the fallen bike, screaming at the top of her lungs as she sped after the car. Bleeding in three places, I watched her go, glad she knew I’d rather have retribution than comfort.”

— Melissa Albert

19. “I did it because a girl doing nothing in a fairy tale ends up dead or worse, but a girl who makes a decision usually gets rewarded.”

— Melissa Albert

20. “My mother was raised on fairy tales, but I was raised on highways.”

— Melissa Albert

21. “We were checked in by a man who looked exactly how the guy checking you in at a cheap motel in the middle of the night is supposed to.”

— Melissa Albert

22. “I remembered less from my own life than I did from the books I read.”

— Melissa Albert

23. “I hated Tennessee Williams’s Laura. She reminded me too much of a fairy-tale character. Not the ones my grandmother wrote, allegedly – those women drew blood. No, she was the worst type of Grimm Brothers beauty: isolated, soft-spoken, waiting for a man to save her. She probably look like me.”

— Melissa Albert

24. “His expression mirrored what I felt – the black-hole suck of exhaustion that strikes after a trauma. When everything has changed and your messed-up brain is flying around the stars – then your body and all its needs imposes itself, cutting you off from madness.”

— Melissa Albert

25. “I followed, realizing with a start that my footsteps made no sound on the tile floor, or the marble stairs. It was instantly disorienting, like trying to talk when your ears are stuffed.”

— Melissa Albert

26. “And maybe everyone felt this way when they moved on – that everything they’d left behind smeared together like watercolors and washed away.”

— Melissa Albert

27. “You might think you have a really good reason, but nothing could be worth this. Nothing could be worth feeling this way. I feel like a changeling wearing someone else’s skin. I can’t remember what I liked, or what I wanted, why I worked or left the house or did anything. It’s all gone... I think whatever I used to be, it dropped through the binding. I wish the rest of me had gone with it.”

— Melissa Albert

28. “Hell is caring about other people.”

— Melissa Albert

29. “It’s hard, isn’t it, to find you’re not at all the thing you thought you were?”

— Melissa Albert

30. “Love rose up like a noose and circled my throat.”

— Melissa Albert

31. “Lana was a ceramicist in her second year at Pratt who looked like David Bowie’s even hotter sister and wore hideous clothes that looked good on her anyway.”

— Melissa Albert

32. “Like all good bookshops, Edgar’s was a pocket universe, where time moved slow as clouds.”

— Melissa Albert

33. “Bleeding in three places, I watched her go, glad she knew I’d rather have retribution than comfort.”

— Melissa Albert

34. “I’m a girl,” I said fiercely. “I’m a person.” “You’re both, and neither. You’re a story, but that doesn’t make you any less true.”

— Melissa Albert

35. “The Hinterland was a clock, perfectly weighted and balanced and spinning in time. The refugees lived tucked among the cogs, learning when to duck and what parts of their borrowed world to avoid.”

— Melissa Albert

36. “You look like you’ve got a million things going through your mind, but you’re not saying them.”

— Melissa Albert

37. “When I looked back over my life, it melted together into one long, soft-focus shot of rain through the windshield. Focus my eyes one way, I saw drops on glass. Focus them another, and I saw the wet highway stretching out ahead.”

— Melissa Albert

38. “Teachers who clocked their students’ alliances, then tried to play matchmaker, were almost as sad as teachers who let themselves get bullied by teenage girls in Nars lip gloss.”

— Melissa Albert

39. “I rolled my eyes so hard, i saw my brain.”

— Melissa Albert

40. “With her silence alone. She wield it like a weapon.”

— Melissa Albert

41. “Alien landscape – something had passed through it, something that didn’t belong. I couldn’t be alone there with that feeling.”

— Melissa Albert

42. “You could guess, though, right? When in doubt, the answer is always Death. With a capital D. That’s the trick of the Hinterland.”

— Melissa Albert

43. “There’s magic born out of pure will, voiceless. No, not pure: will muddied and thickened with grief and terror, and love in all its forms.”

— Melissa Albert

44. “This story is called ‘The Night Country.’ And it is not a fairy tale.”

— Melissa Albert

45. “Behaving the way we had to to get by, while hiding a core that was a mystery even to ourselves.”

— Melissa Albert

46. “The dream I’d been living in for the past hours was fading away. I could remember everything I’d done, but it felt flat as a picture book.”

— Melissa Albert

47. “You say stories run until you stop telling them,′ I said wildly. ‘Can’t you just decide then? To stop telling mine – to let me go?”

— Melissa Albert

48. “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

— Melissa Albert

49. “When a world dies, it doesn’t go out with a whimper.”

— Melissa Albert

50. “The train was full of teenagers with good shoes and too much confidence. I wanted to put sunglasses on to block out their light. I’d felt younger than them once, and older than them now, but we’d never really been the same age. I didn’t know what age I was.”

— Melissa Albert