Top 90 Mindy McGinnis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Be not far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.”

— Mindy McGinnis

2. “It’s going to be hard––everything worth doing is.”

— Mindy McGinnis

3. “All my life people have told me how strong I am, like it’s the best thing I’ve got to offer. I know they mean it in all the ways – physically, emotionally, mentally – and I am. But I’m also tired, worn out from hurting and being expected to come out on top of everything – even a car crash. I’m exhausted in all the ways I’m supposed to be strong...”

— Mindy McGinnis

4. “I’m discovering me out here, for the good and the bad. There’s things I’m proud of and stuff I’d rather forget, but it all makes up who I am and what I was, and what I’ve got to work with if I want to become something else.”

— Mindy McGinnis

5. “But boys will be boys, our favorite phrase that excuses so many things, while the only thing we have for the opposite gender is women, said with disdain and punctuated with an eye roll.”

— Mindy McGinnis

6. “I live in a world where not being molested as a child is considered luck.”

— Mindy McGinnis

7. “I’m telling you, Claire. It doesn’t matter. What you were wearing. What you look like. Nothing. Watch the nature channel. Predators go for the easy prey.”

— Mindy McGinnis

8. “You see it in all animals – the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

— Mindy McGinnis

9. “It’s a madness so discreet that it can walk the streets and be applauded in some circles, but it is madness nonetheless.”

— Mindy McGinnis

10. “Living things will fight to stay that way.”

— Mindy McGinnis

11. “There’s different ways of doing things wrong, Lynn, and not all of it is choosing to hurt others. Sometimes it’s the things you don’t do that make you feel the worst.”

— Mindy McGinnis

12. “I am drawn to the water, yet I know it’s not what calls me.”

— Mindy McGinnis

13. “I am a wolf that my sister kept in a cage, until her hand was removed. I have been out, curious as I wake up from a lethargic solitude, self-enforced because I know I don’t belong here. It’s not safe for me to be out, but they rattled my cage. First Claire and then Jack. And now I’m awake, deviating from the paths I created in order to remain stable. I’m out, I’m awake, and afraid I won’t be easily put back.”

— Mindy McGinnis

14. “A puppy feels like life and love. Their entire bodies are soft – fur, skin, the pads of their feet new and delicate. They radiate warmth in the way science can explain, but it goes further than that. The heat of affection pours out of their eyes and makes their little butts wiggle like crazy as soon as they see a person – they don’t even care who. They’re love, encapsulated.”

— Mindy McGinnis

15. “Venting your primal self in an emotional moment can be more than your socially constructed self can handle after the fact,” Alex says, her eyes gliding over me. “Look at you. Your hands are shaking. Your voice is weak. And your conscience is reasserting itself.”

— Mindy McGinnis

16. “When the pain originates with someone who is gone, it’s your own memory that hurts you.”

— Mindy McGinnis

17. “Once I asked my dad how you know when you’re in love. He said you just know, and that if you have to ask the question then you haven’t been in love yet. And he’s right. Because there aren’t words for this. No combination of letters could ever represent what she is to me.”

— Mindy McGinnis

18. “There are parts of yourself that you hate; parts that you know other people wouldn’t understand. And he knew his own worst elements had been passed on to me, this unwieldy wrath that burns through my brain, turning reason to ash. So I can’t be angry with him for leaving when I understand too well the reason.”

— Mindy McGinnis

19. “When I say the things that don’t make sense you answer me anyway. It’s like having green in your shirt.”

— Mindy McGinnis

20. “When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what.”

— Mindy McGinnis

21. “My mom has poetry in her, something I never would have guessed. It must be where my words come from, flowing through me with a power equaled only by the fire in my gut. They’re moving now, escaping in a way I didn’t mean to or expect.”

— Mindy McGinnis

22. “It’s not the sheep that call to me, but the other wolves. I want to run with them, so that I may tear out their throats when they threaten my flock. But I can’t return to the sheep with blood on my breath; they will shy away from me.”

— Mindy McGinnis

23. “You can love someone down to their core and they can love you right back just as hard, and if you traded diaries you’d learn things you never suspected. There’s a part of everyone deep down inside of them not meant for you. And the sooner you learn that, the easier your life is gonna be.”

— Mindy McGinnis

24. “Anger makes you tired, but guilt keeps you from falling asleep.”

— Mindy McGinnis

25. “She’s like a wild animal ready to bolt, but with nowhere to go. She knows the hurt is inside and running won’t help.”

— Mindy McGinnis

26. “That’s life, little one – lots of little maybes and what ifs all lined up in a row. And if you put your mind to following some of them that never came about, you’ll get lost and not find your way back to the way it really is.”

— Mindy McGinnis

27. “Everyone thinks if you fix a male dog it will lower his aggression, but most of the biters are female. It’s basic instinct to protect their womb. You see it in all animals – the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

— Mindy McGinnis

28. “But sometimes it swings just right and there’s a moment of suspension when I can’t feel it. The rope goes slack and the laws of physics give me one second of relief. I can laugh and smile and feel something else. But those same laws undo me, and when it swings back there’s a sharp tug on my heart to remind me that I forgot.”

— Mindy McGinnis

29. “Killing people was easier when the only face I ever saw was Mother’s back then, anyone else was the enemy and shooting at an outline in a scope wasn’t any different than taking down a deer, just in a different shape.”

— Mindy McGinnis

30. “Quite the opposite; my definition is too broad. I think we’re all quite mad. Some of us are just more discreet about it.”

— Mindy McGinnis

31. “The dead know nothing, and the living have secrets.”

— Mindy McGinnis

32. “Hiking – much like drinking – is something that sounds more fun to the uninitiated than it actually is.”

— Mindy McGinnis

33. “There are laws in place that stop us from doing things. This is what we tell ourselves. In truth we stop ourselves; the law is a guideline for how to punish someone who is caught.”

— Mindy McGinnis

34. “Lynn kept her eye to the scope, unable to look away from the path of the only bullet she had ever fired with love in her heart.”

— Mindy McGinnis

35. “So I had a choice: I could either not do anything for the rest of my life, or I could suck it up and act like it didn’t bother me And you know what? If you pretend long enough that it doesn’t bother you, pretty soon it actually doesn’t.”

— Mindy McGinnis

36. “I text Alex and tell her good night, she responds with the same, and I hold my phone tightly, too aware that the present is all we have if I can’t mention the past and she won’t talk about the future.”

— Mindy McGinnis

37. “If you’re quiet in the woods long enough, you’ll hear something die.”

— Mindy McGinnis

38. “I’ve always known my body, its strength and purpose, the long muscles of my legs and the lean bulge of my biceps. This is different; this is an intimacy with my skeleton, from the exposed broken tips in my foot to the sharp corner of my jaw digging into the ground as I try to get comfortable. I’m learning the deeper parts of me, maybe even past the ones a doctor can name. Right down into my soft bits and then further, where things you can’t actually touch live.”

— Mindy McGinnis

39. “Sometimes the actions of the sane make no sense.”

— Mindy McGinnis

40. “So what happened?” Mom asks; there’s a tone of resignation, the sound of a parent who has tried really hard for a long time and realizes that the end of the tunnel doesn’t have a light so much as a black hole.”

— Mindy McGinnis

41. “Violence begets violence, and if I want to be a cog in that wheel, I have to accept when it stops on me.”

— Mindy McGinnis

42. “I’d lost everything I had. I didn’t have the heart to take from someone else.” “Plus I would’ve sniped your ass.”

— Mindy McGinnis

43. “Dear child, do you even know all the rage that is inside you?”

— Mindy McGinnis

44. “And I hug her again. Because I just can’t stop touching this girl.”

— Mindy McGinnis

45. “There are parts of yourself that you hate; parts that you know other people wouldn’t understand.”

— Mindy McGinnis

46. “Ray Parsons, you have no soul”, she says, her voice gaining volume as she speaks. “You are a bag of skin. You are a pile of bones. Every cell that has ever split inside of you was a waste of energy. Where you walk you leave a vacuum. Your existence should cease.”

— Mindy McGinnis

47. “I know that the parts of Anna’s body they could recover are six feet below, as sheltered as can be from the worms and the ruin, resting on satin and in an utter darkness that even I can’t contemplate. But I know that’s not her. Whatever makes us flew from her with only one witness to the moment, someone who should have never known her at all.”

— Mindy McGinnis

48. “I’ve been trying to do better about killing people,” Lynn said. “Then fate puts you in my path.”

— Mindy McGinnis

49. “But I’ve smelled you, smelledthe wrongness of all that’s been done to you by hands familiar and those of strangers. You chose to stop acknowledging a world that has treated you foully. What’s saner than that?”

— Mindy McGinnis

50. “Thank you,′ Mom says, dropping one of my bags to the floor with a huff. There’s a fine sheen of sweat on her upper lip. It must be exhausting carrying around all of my issues.”

— Mindy McGinnis