Top 35 Monica Hesse Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes hope can be poisonous.”

— Monica Hesse

2. “But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.”

— Monica Hesse

3. “Lucky has become such a relative term, when the standards to meet it involve only not being treated like a criminal in your own home city.”

— Monica Hesse

5. “My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it’s possible to be healed without feeling whole.”

— Monica Hesse

6. “Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out.”

— Monica Hesse

7. “I found a girl who wasn’t the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I’ll still miss every day. I’ll go back to work. I’ll get better. I’ll get better slowly. I’ll find all the secret, hidden things.”

— Monica Hesse

8. “Girls in love will do desperate and creative things.”

— Monica Hesse

9. “Fear. That’s right. That was the odor I couldn’t place before. That’s the smell of my beautiful, breaking country.”

— Monica Hesse

10. “Maybe we can’t barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.”

— Monica Hesse

11. “The absence of pain is not the same as the presence of happiness”.”

— Monica Hesse

12. “I like the idea of that small rebellion, carrying a paper piece of the resistance in my shoes.”

— Monica Hesse

13. “Tow best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I’m sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.”

— Monica Hesse

14. “None of these are the miracles I was looking for. But they’re miracles nonetheless.”

— Monica Hesse

15. “But I suppose love doesn’t stop, even in wars. There’s only so much time a day that you can spend being terrified of something before your instinct to feel natural human emotions would kick in.”

— Monica Hesse

16. “You can’t change endings by going back and changing beginnings.”

— Monica Hesse

17. “We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn’t know. We didn’t mean it. It wasn’t our fault.”

— Monica Hesse

18. “What’s the minimum expectation I have for human decency in a war that was entirely inhumane?”

— Monica Hesse

19. “And you don’t have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend.”

— Monica Hesse

20. “We need girls who are pretty so the soldiers don’t notice that they’re also smart and brave and working against them.”

— Monica Hesse

21. “Can I understand? Was leaving enough? Was deserting enough? What would I consider enough? Would I have asked him to shoot his superior officers before he deserted? Go into hiding rather than enlist at all? Try to spy for the Allies? What’s the minimum expectation I have for human decency in a war the was entirely inhumane?”

— Monica Hesse

22. “I would care that someone understood we were flawed and scarred and doing the best we could in this war. We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn’t know. We didn’t mean to. It wasn’t our fault.”

— Monica Hesse

23. “As economies change, as landscapes change, nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing. We gorge on it ourselves and pass it down to generations.”

— Monica Hesse

24. “Then you know. You know what it’s like to love someone like you love yourself and lose them.”

— Monica Hesse

25. “They’re having a march, another one, a chance for rows of them to peacock through the streets in their helmets and black boots.”

— Monica Hesse

26. “This was not the story of Accomack. This was the story of America. In 1910, back in the peak of the Eastern Shore’s wealth, more than 70 percent of Americans lived in rural counties. It was the norm, it was the standard. Now, rural counties contained only 15 percent of the nation’s population.”

— Monica Hesse

27. “But I supposed love doesn’t stop, even in wars.”

— Monica Hesse

28. “Isn’t love the opposite of rational?”

— Monica Hesse

29. “It doesn’t matter why people do things. It doesn’t matter because sometimes things are wrong, completely wrong, no matter why they were done or what justifications people try to give.”

— Monica Hesse

30. “The trouble with being the type of person who would do anything for love was that you would do anything for love.”

— Monica Hesse

31. “It is the greatest tragedy and the greatest beauty of a relationship: that at some level, the person you are closest to will always be a total friggin’ mystery.”

— Monica Hesse

32. “We must love the people in front of us. We must forgive ourselves for the things we did to survive. The things we broke. The things that broke us.”

— Monica Hesse

33. “Choose to love.”

— Monica Hesse

34. “It ended. Of course it did, it finally did, and like a lot of things, by the time it actually ended, people were starting to become a little less aware of the fact that it was still going on at all.”

— Monica Hesse

35. “And now we’re supposed to live with people who either wished for our deaths or looked the other way while it happened.”

— Monica Hesse

36. “I don’t know which is more unfathomable to me: the base evil and cruelty of the Holocaust, or the undying hope that survivors managed to take out of it. I don’t know which is more unfathomable, but I do know which we should inspire to.”

— Monica Hesse

37. “I choose to love the parson in front of me.”

— Monica Hesse

38. “The war didn’t end people’s prejudice.”

— Monica Hesse