Top 35 Monica Wood Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Physician’s assistant.”

— Monica Wood

2. “It took years for me to know this, to see how loss can tighten your grip on the things still possible to hold.”

— Monica Wood

3. “I have always loved books for their reassuring heft, for their promise of new words, for their air of mystery, for their characters who lived in them, for the sublime pleasure of disappearing. But not until now, at the threshold of this perilous summer, have I ever turned to storybooks for instruction.”

— Monica Wood

4. “Certain things, examined in the frozen light of retrospect, were simply unforgivable. He.”

— Monica Wood

5. “His cheeks were all pinked up. Travel agreed with him, and she might have known: people like Quinn, always running from themselves, loved the road.”

— Monica Wood

6. “Convince is for thought; persuade is for action.”

— Monica Wood

7. “I’m forty-two,” he said. “That’s eighty-four in musician years.”

— Monica Wood

8. “It does take time. From the day I laid eyes on her, I wished Miss Louise Grady could just once look at me and see me. For years I kept that twinkling chance like a jewel in a box. That’s what unrequited means.”

— Monica Wood

9. “There is no such thing as wasted writing.”

— Monica Wood

10. “Because the story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don’t they teach you anything in school?”

— Monica Wood

11. “But certain others, they move in and make themselves at home and start flapping their arms in the story you make of your life. They have a wingspan.”

— Monica Wood

12. “Your sister strikes me as the type of driver who raises the rates for everybody else.” “Good.”

— Monica Wood

13. “He’d read obsessively-... -picking up linguistic baubles like a crow mining a roadside.”

— Monica Wood

14. “The packet of fading photos gives it away if you know how to look: always a rundown porch landing and stair rails behind, always a child squinting into strong sunlight and a grim-faced adult skulking in shadow. What must it have been like to grow up in that silence?”

— Monica Wood

15. “When he sauntered into the house and took a brownie without asking, she realized how long it had been since someone paid her the compliment of presumption.”

— Monica Wood

16. “They were on a first-name basis now, united in female solidarity after a twenty-minute conversation about cats. How women cemented alliances over less than nothing impressed him anew.”

— Monica Wood

17. “Because the story of your life never starts at the beginning.”

— Monica Wood

18. “Gradually, the darkness sculpted itself into air and object, the appointments of her room materializing as smoky shapes: a skyline of perfume bottles on her dresser...”

— Monica Wood

19. “She died that evening and left me, in Louise fashion, sitting in ten kinds of dark.”

— Monica Wood

20. “He had not loved his son enough. This knowledge lived like a malignancy on his heart.”

— Monica Wood

21. “A busload of pilgrims today on journeys they never chose, having once believed themselves born for more than this.”

— Monica Wood

22. “But even talented people, sooner or later, cracked their heads against their own personal ceilings.”

— Monica Wood

23. “Convince is for thought; persuade is for action. You couldn’t convince me that taping my horrible old-lady voice was a good idea, but you persuaded me to do it anyway, didn’t you, you little dickens?”

— Monica Wood

24. “The shape of our family has been upended and rearranged, its roof flattened, its gateposts ripped from the earth by God’s own brutal hand, and only the animals know enough to make a run for it.”

— Monica Wood

25. “A young receptionist greeted him with a buoyancy born of an excellent benefits package.”

— Monica Wood

26. “You’d have thought Louise was the snow itself, falling all around me, muffling the cold and the wind even as she was the source of it.”

— Monica Wood

27. “Rennie’s people got regular breaks, footrests, English lessons, and nine bucks an hour to start. There was almost no turnover. Quinn.”

— Monica Wood

28. “I look like someone at a costume party who nobody can guess what they’re supposed to be.”

— Monica Wood

29. “Mrs. Japan and Mrs. Romania had unpronounceable names, the former free-floating with vowels, the latter fortressed by consonants.”

— Monica Wood

30. “We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.”

— Monica Wood

31. “The writer writes the words. The given reader reads the words. And the book, the unique and unrepeatable book, doesn’t exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.”

— Monica Wood

32. “In the old lady’s house. It was just like he wrote in his diary. There was, quote, magic afoot.” Belle managed something like a laugh despite her sorrow, for the boy’s syntactical oddities had always pleased her. He’d read obsessively – instruction manuals, record books, novels far too old for him – picking up linguistic baubles like a crow mining a roadside.”

— Monica Wood

33. “Perhaps it’s an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly, or maybe we expect so little of men their transgressions don’t register the same.”

— Monica Wood

34. “People don’t write their own endings,” he said.”

— Monica Wood

35. “I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.”

— Monica Wood

36. “This night I’m thinking of, it had one of those skies where the stars looked poured from a barrel.”

— Monica Wood

37. “The problem with retrospect is it never shows up beforehand.”

— Monica Wood