Top 35 Miranda Cowley Heller Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Knowledge can be power, but it can also be poison.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

2. “The best lesson my mother ever taught me: there are two things in life you never regret – a baby and a swim.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

3. “Does letting go mean losing everything you have, or does it mean gaining everything you never had?”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

4. “Ever since I was old enough to question my own instincts, my mother has given me the same piece of advice: “Flip a coin, Eleanor. If the answer you get disappoints you, do the opposite.” We already know the right answer, even when we don’t – or we think we don’t. But what if it’s a trick coin? What if both sides are the same? If both are right, then both are wrong.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

5. “Every single time I see the ocean, even if I’ve been there in the morning, it feels like a new miracle – its power, its blueness always just as overwhelming. Like falling in love.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

6. “High above the tallest dune, a star appears in the sky, faint at first, then gaining strength until it becomes a brilliant jewel. And yet I know it is death I am seeing. The flickering out. The silent gasp. The sputtering beauty. A desperate flame – massive, transcendent – fighting for its last breath.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

7. “She would go to the cemetery to read, curled up in the shade of a tomb, comforted by the souls of the dead.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

8. “I love Gina. But I carry you in my bloodstream. This isn’t a choice.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

9. “The waiting begins early, I think. The lies begin early. But so do dreams and hopes and stories.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

10. “At the crest of the hill two stallions backs black against a nectar wash graze on the green-tang clover, acorns to sniff out. We lie together beneath the flowering hawthorn, your white collar unbuttoned. Once, I heard the sound of wind under water, breathed in the sea and survived.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

11. “But it’s what we do, what we’ve done for years now. We drag our past behind us like a weight, still shackled, but far enough back that we never have to see, never have to openly acknowledge who we once were.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

12. “There are some swims you do regret, Eleanor. The problem is, you never know until you take them.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

13. “But this time when I pull away from him, it is agonizing. Not found, but lost. I pause, stand on the precipice of memory, wanting so desperately to fall into it, knowing I can’t. Jonas is animal, Peter is mineral. And I need a rock.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

14. “I wonder if he would love me if he could see inside my head, the pettiness, the dirty linen of my thoughts, the terrible things that I have done.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

15. “Sitting around a beach bonfire at night, grown-ups and children ate sand-crunchy hamburgers covered in ketchup and relish, set up on driftwood tables. Our parents drank gin from jelly jars and disappeared into the darkness beyond the fire’s glow to kiss their lovers in the tall beach grass.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

16. “He would never know. But I would. Knowledge can be power, but it can also be poison.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

17. “Kisses me with the intensity of every day, every month, every year we have loved each other. It is not our first kiss. That was long ago, underwater, when we were children – when we said goodbye for the first time, knowing it would not be the last.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

18. “It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours and already, when I’m not with him, I’m marking time until I am – as if my own life has ceased to exist and is only the time in between him and him. It angers me, this endless jangling. I picture my stomach cavity filled to the brim with little pieces of bitten fingernails. A lifetime’s worth of pain that never got digested. When they cut me open, that’s what they will find. Strange deposits, sharp and brittle.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

19. “He turned to swim back, but the landscape had changed. Now he was drifting past an unfamiliar shore, pulled by a current too strong for him to fight. –.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

20. “If I could fly backward, I would,” I said. To the safety of branches, to the time when my heart raced for him like a hummingbird’s, 1,200 beats per second. And he said, as he always did, “I know.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

21. “Jonas is animal, Peter is mineral. And I need a rock.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

22. “We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. – Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To a Skylark.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

23. “No more regrets for what I haven’t done. Now only regrets for what I have done. I love him, I hate myself; I love myself, I hate him. This is the end of a long story.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

24. “I swear to Christ, I will never understand you Back Woods people. You have the perfect life in the most gorgeous place on the planet and all you can say is ‘It’s too hot.’ Jonas was like pulling teeth this morning. Swim time,” Gina calls out to Finn and Maddy. “Last one in, cutie pies. It’s time to boogie.” She gives a little booty shake. Maddy looks over at me with an expression of pure horror, but they follow her down to the water, racing to dive in headfirst.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

25. “Just so we are clear,” he says, “I will never love anyone the way I love you.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

26. “I could look at him and nothing else for eternity and be happy. I could listen to him, my eyes closed, feel his breath and his words wash over me, time and time and time again. It is all I want.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

27. “He takes my hair in his fists, kisses me. Rough, hard, unhinged. I don’t want to give in, but I kiss him back with a love that feels like drowning. The breathless desire to breathe.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

28. “I’m in love with you, too,” I say. “But I’m not sure it matters.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

29. “I could look at him and nothing else for eternity and be happy.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

30. “Jonas is always looking well mum.” Thick black hair you can grasp in your fists, pale green eyes, skin burned by sap and pine, a wild creature, the most beautiful man on earth.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

31. “All these years I’ve thought about him, missed him, wanted to walk next to him on the quiet paths, souls twinned together. But now that he is here with me, all I see is how far apart our lives have grown.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

32. “Flip a coin, Eleanor. If the answer you get disappoints you, do the opposite.” We already know the right answer, even when we don’t – or we think we don’t.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

33. “She covers my face and neck in wet cheesecloths soaked in calamine lotion. I look like the leper from Ben-Hur. She brings me cold chamomile tea and a straw. Puts a bowl of ice next to the bed. Swallowing is torture.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

34. “Stay. If he loves you he’ll wait. I did. I have.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

35. “Andrea waves the smoke away from her face every time Martha exhales, but Martha ignores her and, if anything, seems to exhale more directly into Andrea’s face each time. I have always enjoyed Martha.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

36. “He likes Leo a lot, he tells Mum, but marriages end, children don’t.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

37. “Brits always insist on acting as if weather doesn’t exist. It starts pouring rain and they just turn their collars up.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

38. “I hold my book up to my face, sniff the pages. I love the way library books smell: more important than regular books, a grand olden-days smell, like the steps of a marble palace, or a senator.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller

39. “Divorce is good for children.” She stood up and began clearing away a few lingering dinner forks. “Unhappy people are always more interesting.”

— Miranda Cowley Heller