Top 100 Nina George Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He calls books freedoms. And homes too. They preserve all the good words that we so seldom use. Leniency. Kindness. Contradiction. Forbearance.”

— Nina George

52. “Coincidences are surprising events whose meaning only becomes apparent in retrospect. They’re a chance to change your life, and you can either seize that opportunity or spurn it.”

— Nina George

53. “Death is not free. Its price is life.”

— Nina George

54. “Books were my friends,” said Catherine, and cooled her cheek, which was red from the heat of cooking, on her wineglass. “I think I learned all my feelings from books. In them I loved and laughed and found out more than in my whole nonreading life.”

— Nina George

55. “He remembered what his father had said when Simon complained about the wild, unruly sea: “Learn to love it, son. Learn to love what you do, whatever it is, and you won’t have any problems. You’ll suffer, but then you’ll feel, and when you feel, you’re alive. You need troubles to be alive – otherwise you’re dead!”

— Nina George

56. “All the love, all the dead, all the people we’ve known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of souls. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too.”

— Nina George

57. “You’re right, Manon. It is all still there. The times we spent together are immortal, imperishable, and life never stops. The death of our loved ones is merely a threshold between an ending and a new beginning.”

— Nina George

58. “Sometimes you’re swimming in unwept tears and you’ll go under if you store them up inside.”

— Nina George

59. “Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do.”

— Nina George

60. “The further life advanced, the more protective the elderly were of their good days: nothing should imperil the time they had left.”

— Nina George

61. “We are loved if we love, another truth we always seem to forget. Have you noticed that most people prefer to be loved, and will do anything it takes? Diet, rake in the money, wear scarlet underwear. If only they loved with the same energy; hallelujah, the world would be so wonderful and so free of tummy-tuck tights.” Jean.”

— Nina George

62. “He’s short, fat and, objectively speaking, not the most obvious choice of pin-up boy. But he’s smart, strong and he can probably do whatever’s necessary for a life of love. I think he’s the most beautiful man I will ever kiss,’ said Samy. ‘It’s strange that magnificent, good-hearted people like him don’t receive more love. Do their looks disguise their character so well that nobody notices how open their soul, their being and their principles are to love and kindness?”

— Nina George

63. “Everything was to be experienced at the highest pitch of passion and life. To expect something greater after life was to forget that life was the greatest thing of all. He had forgotten that, and now he wanted to live with all his strength and with no further dread.”

— Nina George

64. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go out and greet those wonderful creatures and say a few nice words in a language invented by Tolkein. I’ve practiced, but I sound like Chewbacca making a New Year’s speech.”

— Nina George

65. “He wished he could prop his fearful self up in a corner like a broom and walk away.”

— Nina George

66. “Women tell you more about the world. Men only tell you about themselves.”

— Nina George

67. “He had found beneath the sorrow a place where emotion and happiness could live alongside tenderness and the realization that he was lovable after all.”

— Nina George

68. “Books keep stupidity at bay.”

— Nina George

69. “One might have to be a little ruthless to seize back control of one’s life, don’t you think?”

— Nina George

70. “Anyone who’s good at something is hated – or not loved in any case.”

— Nina George

71. “Any man who loves a woman as she deserves to be loved is a magician.”

— Nina George

72. “All right,” she said. “Give me the books that are kind to me, and to hell with the men who don’t give a damn about me.”

— Nina George

73. “I don’t know how many years it’s been since I last slept with my husband. I was faithful, stupid and so awfully lonely that I’ll gobble you up if you’re nice to me. Or kill you because I can’t bear it.”

— Nina George

74. “He wanted her to sense the boundless possibilities offered by books. They would always be enough. They would never stop loving their readers. They were a fixed point in an otherwise unpredictable world. In life. In love. After death.”

— Nina George

75. “Nobody would ever wise up if they hadn’t at some stage been young and stupid.”

— Nina George

76. “What a hideous life he had chosen, how painful was the loneliness he endured because he didn’t have the courage to trust someone again. To trust someone entirely because in love there is no other way.”

— Nina George

77. “He was overawed by her open, fearless affection. Was this why people liked friendship so much?”

— Nina George

78. “Capitano Perduto, I’m a firm believer that you have to taste a country’s soul to understand it and to grasp its people. And by soul I mean what grows there, what its people see and smell and touch every day, what travels through them and shapes them from the inside out.”

— Nina George

79. “The trouble is that so many people, most of them women, think they have to have a perfect body to be loved. But all it has to do is be capable of loving – and being loved.”

— Nina George

80. “We all grow old, even books. But are you, is anyone, worth less, or less important, because they’ve been around for longer?”

— Nina George

81. “All of us preserve time. We preserve the old versions of the people who have left us. And under our skin, under the layer of wrinkles and experience and laughter, we, too, are old versions of ourselves. Directly below the surface, we are our former selves: the former child, the former lover, the former daughter.”

— Nina George

82. “If someone suffers and won’t change, then they need to suffer.”

— Nina George

83. “The more important a thing is, the slower it should be done.”

— Nina George

84. “Loving requires so much courage and so little expectation.”

— Nina George

85. “Fashion has nothing to do with style,” said Colette in her husky voice. “It all depends on whether you want to conceal or reveal who you are.”

— Nina George

86. “A wood that smells of the sea.”

— Nina George

87. “He had barred himself from mourning because... because he had never been part of Manon’s life. Because there was nobody to mourn with him. Because he was alone, totally alone with the burden of his love.”

— Nina George

88. “It was said that their purring could patch a pail of broken bones back together and revive a fossilized soul; yet when their work was done, cats would go their own way without a backward glance. They loved without reticence, no strings attached – but no promises either.”

— Nina George

89. “Perdu reflected that is was a common misconception that booksellers looked after books. They look after people.”

— Nina George

90. “Shouldn’t we carry on living the same way until the last, because that is what vexes death the most – to see us drinking life to the final draft?”

— Nina George

91. “Books are more than doctors, of course. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you’ve got those autumn blues. And some... well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful voice. Like a short, torrid love affair.”

— Nina George

92. “Dreams are the interface between the worlds, between time and space.”

— Nina George

93. “I don’t know why we women believe that sacrificing our desires makes us more attractive to men. What on earth are we thinking? That someone who goes without her wishes deserves to be loved more than she who follows her dreams?”

— Nina George

94. “Between yes and no,” Samy answered. “Difficult question. We don’t generally lie around for days wallowing in our happiness like roast beef in gravy, do we? Happiness is so short-lived. How long have you ever been genuinely happy in one stretch?”

— Nina George

95. “You’re a different person if you’ve been warmed by open fires rather than by central heating as a child, if you’ve climbed trees instead of cycling on the pavement with a helmet on, if you’ve played outside rather than sitting in front of the television.”

— Nina George

96. “I like being alive, even if it’s occasionally a real struggle and fairly pointless in the grand scheme of things.”

— Nina George

97. “We are immortal in the dreams of our loved ones. And our dead live on after their deaths in our dreams.”

— Nina George

98. “Down south they listen to the sea in order to understand that laughing and crying sound the same, and that the soul sometimes needs to cry to be happy.”

— Nina George

99. “Everybody has an inner room where demons lurk. Only when we open it and face up to it are we free,” said Catherine.”

— Nina George

100. “Asking questions is an art.”

— Nina George