Top 40 Nancy Thayer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s never too late-in fiction or in life-to revise.”

— Nancy Thayer

2. “Never trust an atom. They make up everything.”

— Nancy Thayer

3. “No one knows how it is that with one glance a boy can break through into a girl’s heart.”

— Nancy Thayer

4. “I have discovered the meaning of life. It resides in what I can wrest from each day that I live.”

— Nancy Thayer

5. “Mom said when she brought us beachcombing? She told us to always believe in something more. She told us to look at what was right in front of us, and we’d see that even a grain of sand was a miracle. That even a bit of glass was a message, that the universe was full of tricks and clues and signs.”

— Nancy Thayer

6. “Who is getting more pleasure from this rocking, the baby or me?”

— Nancy Thayer

7. “No matter how wild the winds or rough the seas of life, libraries stand ready, beaming their reliable lights, guiding us toward knowledge, pleasure, consolation, wisdom, and hope.”

— Nancy Thayer

8. “You know if you pick up a beach read, you’re excused from the problems in your own life and safe in a world with conflicts you understand, and you know you will get a happy ending.”

— Nancy Thayer

9. “The waves had already washed away her footprints. But the tide had left something: a small creamy rock shaped like a heart, polished into a dull gleam by sand and water. Emma picked it up and held it in her hand. Her mother would say: The sea has given you a sign.”

— Nancy Thayer

10. “A good friend once said, “If you break your arm, people rush to bring you flowers, food, and sympathy, but if your mind breaks even just a little, people run away, frightened and dismayed.”

— Nancy Thayer

11. “Their friendship is like a tapestry in a drawer. Today is the iron passing over the cloth, smoothing out the wrinkles, bring out the pattern that makes it unique and beautiful.”

— Nancy Thayer

12. “Two different kinds of people exist: Those who wade cautiously into the shallows and those who throw themselves headlong into the roaring surf.”

— Nancy Thayer

13. “Where’s your self-respect? Why don’t you get yourself in control? Life cannot hang on the love of one other person; you have got to hang your life on yourself.”

— Nancy Thayer

14. “Sometimes it’s quite enough simply to be happy.”

— Nancy Thayer

15. “The land doesn’t know who owns it. It was here before owners, and will be here after, content with itself in all seasons.”

— Nancy Thayer

16. “It’s funny, but if I had to say whom I’m closer to, who knows me better, I’d have a hard time choosing between my husband and my best friend.”

— Nancy Thayer

17. “Perhaps in every close friendship there is an element of, if not competition, then comparison. Perhaps that is one of the things that makes a friend belong especially to us. Somehow, in the secrecy of our hearts, a scale must balance.”

— Nancy Thayer

18. “Your generation does everything so fast I think you’ve forgotten how to enjoy the pleasures of going slow.”

— Nancy Thayer

19. “Life on earth may be limited, but grandchildren were the promise of the eternal.”

— Nancy Thayer

20. “If you believe in telekinesis, please raise my hand.”

— Nancy Thayer

21. “Music is one of the most efficient mood elevators we have. People in nursing homes, whether ambulatory or even bedridden, whether lucid or not, would be provided with great pleasure by your playing. Maybe they could even dream, return to the best times in their lives, when they were loved.”

— Nancy Thayer

22. “Somewhere I read that human beings are the only creatures to spend the present driving themselves crazy about the future.”

— Nancy Thayer

23. “It hurts my heart, too, sweetie, but you know what? Sometimes crying is a kind of cure. Sometimes that’s what the body and the heart need to do. It’s hard to watch, but it’s not always a bad thing.”

— Nancy Thayer

24. “So maybe they didn’t get where they intended to go, but they ended up where they were meant to be.”

— Nancy Thayer

25. “Does every woman at some point in her life wander through the sleeping house, looking in at her husband and children, and wonder what she’s doing here, in this particular life?”

— Nancy Thayer

26. “From the distance came the deep resonant rumble of the jet’s engines as it disappeared from their sight. In her euphoria, Joanna silently saluted the jet and thought that the very sound of movement was just one of the many things to which she belonged.”

— Nancy Thayer

27. “Are there any “ordinary” women? I don’t think so.”

— Nancy Thayer

28. “She loved them both, of course, but they weren’t nearly as interesting as any one thing she might be doing on any day. Her life was the song. Her parents were background music.”

— Nancy Thayer

29. “Often, Bessie would reply, “Child, I don’t think that’s a question anyone on this earth has the true answer for. The best advice I can give you is to keep reading.”

— Nancy Thayer

30. “She was aware of the two men in the room, both of them carrying their burden of history, their charms and flaws, their heaviness and guilt, for no adult was ever really without guilt of some sort.”

— Nancy Thayer

31. “Life isn’t all about money, Keely. Remember what you and Isabelle used to call yourselves? Surfside Sisters? Because you would both leap into life instead of dawdling at the edge, waiting, until it was safe.”

— Nancy Thayer

32. “I think anger is often a kind of recycled fear.”

— Nancy Thayer

33. “She always gave herself some time to browse the library shelves to check out new reads she hadn’t heard about and wasn’t sure she would want to stick with. Like agreeing to only coffee on a first date, rather than an entire meal.”

— Nancy Thayer

34. “How odd it was, Eleanor thought, to have grown children who’ve become people you don’t really know. Or maybe it was this way only in her family.”

— Nancy Thayer

35. “The Great Point lighthouse rose at the far end of the barrier beach, a tall white steeple to the sky, with a working light flashing at the top. Here was the end of the island, the great point where the Atlantic Ocean met Nantucket Sound in a froth of waves. All along the point, enormous fat seals lolled on the sand, occasionally lumbering in and out of the water, grunting and lounging like a tribe of overfed Roman emperors.”

— Nancy Thayer

36. “As she watched, she realized a kind of force field kept her parents together so that even as they fought, they were two halves of a whole. They were joined not only by the laws of marriage and the passage of time and the parenting of a child but by an invisible yet unbreakable bond that held them together even as they struggled to be apart.”

— Nancy Thayer

37. “It can change the way you feel about things,” Eleanor reminded her. “A walk by the sea is always good for the soul.”

— Nancy Thayer

38. “Relief and something like joy flew up inside Trevor’s chest. They give us these miracles, these pardons, so generously, he thought; they crush our spirits like crashing boulders only to hold open their hands to give us jewels.”

— Nancy Thayer

39. “I always keep one cold, just in case,” Jake said as he uncorked the bottle and took out two crystal flutes, and Joanna smiled with delight at this new bit of insight into Jake’s life – what a wonderful man he was, what an optimist, always to have a bottle of champagne ready, always certain, even after all life had tossed him, that on any normal day life might give him something to celebrate.”

— Nancy Thayer

40. “Sophie felt as if she were encased in a glass globe called summer.”

— Nancy Thayer