Top 250 Rachel Cohn Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The best is when we all go at once, like an army of interrelated popcorn zombies who laugh the same laughs and gasp the same gasps and aren’t so germ-phobic with each other that we won’t share a ginormous Coke with one straw. Family is useful like that.”

— Rachel Cohn

52. “This is the funny thing about New York – there are so many things to do at all times of the day, but there are still moments when you have no idea which of them to do, and feel extra silly because you know there has to be something out there for you to do; your mind just hasn’t found it yet.”

— Rachel Cohn

53. “That’s what I like about sports. No matter if everyone playing the game speaks completely different languages, on the field, or the court, wherever they are playing, the language of moves and passes and scores is all the same. Universal.”

— Rachel Cohn

54. “This must be part of Mother Nature’s master plan – making these boys so irresistibly cute, in such a naughty way, that the purity of their intentions becomes irrelevant.”

— Rachel Cohn

55. “I hope I never love someone so much that they could hurt me.”

— Rachel Cohn

56. “Who else would find me at just this moment? First he found me drunk, now he found me cleaning up poo from a barking pony who was about to go into attack mode.”

— Rachel Cohn

57. “Nick and I could become goodwill ambassadors for the city now that the porno shops on 42nd Street are gone. Must make mental note to contact mayor.”

— Rachel Cohn

58. “What’s better, I wonder – to be a toy for the humans, or to control your own destiny, even if the only way to do so is suicide?”

— Rachel Cohn

59. “I particularly loved the adjective bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler.”

— Rachel Cohn

60. “The handwriting was a girl’s. I mean, you can tell. That enchanted cursive.”

— Rachel Cohn

61. “The universe doesn’t decide what’s right or not right. You do.”

— Rachel Cohn

62. “But she’s not, and I am left to wonder on my own: How does this work, the getting to know a new guy without revealing too much desperation for his undivided attention?”

— Rachel Cohn

63. “Our love had been liking; our feelings had been ordinary, not Shakespearean. I still felt fondness for her – fondness, that pleasant, detached mix of admiration and sentiment, appreciation and nostalgia.”

— Rachel Cohn

64. “Snarl had infiltrated my subconscious. The dream was obviously a sign: he was too enticing to resist.”

— Rachel Cohn

65. “I’ve always been sort of a closet sci-fi geek.”

— Rachel Cohn

66. “We met in the park to wrest the afternoon into the shape of a stroll.”

— Rachel Cohn

67. “I could become a nun even if I am a non-believer. I’ll learn to fake it like Nick did with me. I will minister the gospel of compassion and kindness and please, always use a condom, from famine-stricken nations to war-torn dead zones. It’s possible I might become a nun who kisses other nuns...”

— Rachel Cohn

68. “All this hoping for nothing-or someone-that’s maybe hopeless.”

— Rachel Cohn

69. “She smells like marijuana smoke. It’s not a bad smell. Just a sad one.”

— Rachel Cohn

70. “Listen to me: I never married because I was too easily bored. It’s an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It’s much better to be too easily interested.”

— Rachel Cohn

71. “People come to New York to be different, but I go to Starbucks to be the same.”

— Rachel Cohn

72. “We always see the worst in our selves. Our most volnerable selves. We need someone to get close enough to tell us that we’re wrong. Someone we trust.”

— Rachel Cohn

73. “It broke the spell. It’s not that I stopped being happy. I was still inexplicably, utterly happy. But suddenly the happiness had implications.”

— Rachel Cohn

74. “Do you still Kill Gerbils?”

— Rachel Cohn

75. “We all just took the bookstore at its word, because if you couldn’t trust a bookstore, what could you trust?”

— Rachel Cohn

76. “I’ve always resented Hermione, because I wanted to be her so badly and she never seemed to appreciate as much as I thought she should that she got be her. She got to live at Hogwarts and be friends with Harry and kiss Ron, which was supposed to happen to me.”

— Rachel Cohn

77. “Things change all the time, mostly in little ways.”

— Rachel Cohn

78. “Well sure, who doesn’t need a boyfriend? but realistically, those exotic creatures are hard to come by. At least a quality one.”

— Rachel Cohn

79. “We are the ones who take this thing called music and line it up with this thing called time. We are the ticking, we are the pulsing, we are underneath every part of this moment. And by making the moment our own, we are rendering it timeless. There is no audience. There are no instruments. There are only bodies and thoughts and murmurs and looks. It’s the concert rush to end all concert rushes, because this is what matters. When the heart races, this is what it’s racing towards.”

— Rachel Cohn

80. “Maybe, I thought, it’s not distance that’s the problem, but how you handle it.”

— Rachel Cohn

81. “Males are the most incomprehensible species.”

— Rachel Cohn

82. “I’m mad at global warming for all the obvious reasons, but mostly I’m mad at it for ruining Christmas. This time of year is supposed to be about teeth-chattering, cold weather that necessitates coats, scarves, and mittens. Outside there should be see-your-breath air that offers the promise of sidewalks covered in snow, while inside, families drink hot chocolate by a roaring fire, huddled close together with their pets to keep warm.”

— Rachel Cohn

83. “I feel like there’s so much darkness in all of my books.”

— Rachel Cohn

84. “I guess I’m nervous to be meeting you,” Lily said at long last, eyes still closed. “Likewise,” I assured her. “I find I very rarely live up to my words. And since you know me primarily through my words, there are oh so many ways I can disappoint.”

— Rachel Cohn

85. “I half expected to find Sherlock Holmes thumb wrestling with Jane Austen in the corner.”

— Rachel Cohn

86. “The reward is in the risk. You can’t stay hidden inside Grandpa’s overprotective cloak forever. You’ve seemed like you needed to grow out of that for a while. Mom and Dad going away, and the red notebook, these things just helped. Now it’s up to you to.”

— Rachel Cohn

87. “Because I withered under the glare of an actual invitation, I was a firm believer in preventive prevarication – in other words, lying early in order to free myself later on.”

— Rachel Cohn

88. “How can you not be concerned that I might have cancer?” I ask. “I found a lump on my breast.” Touch it, Ely. Touch it. “Lie. Not only are you biting your lip, which you always do when you lie, but your mom told me about the alleged lump in the elevator this morning. The doctor said it was an overgrown pimple.” Monkeys!”

— Rachel Cohn

89. “Well what’s in your Amazonian hope chest?”

— Rachel Cohn

90. “I’m liking that I can throw any kind of sentence at her without worrying it’s too out there.”

— Rachel Cohn

91. “And escape?” “Escape, sure. But it wasn’t so much about getting away, as going to. You can go anywhere in a book. Books.”

— Rachel Cohn

92. “You think fairy tales are only for girls? Here’s a hint – ask yourself who wrote them. I assure you, it wasn’t just the women. It’s the great male fantasy – all it takes is one dance to know that she’s the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know – this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want their princes, but boys want their princesses just as much. And they don’t want a very long courtship. They want to know immediately.”

— Rachel Cohn

93. “We will go Awful and die together. But we will do it as free Betas. Not as puppets of the humans.”

— Rachel Cohn

94. “Bruises mapped my body from bumping into tables and tripping over curbs while walking with a book in my hand, my eyes focused on the pages instead of the live space around me.”

— Rachel Cohn

95. “But love needs to have a future. And Sofia and I don’t have a future. We’ve just had a good time sharing the present, that’s all.”

— Rachel Cohn

96. “It still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions.”

— Rachel Cohn

97. “I feel like you may be a special and kind person. And I would like to make it my business to know special and kind people. Especially if they are boys my age.”

— Rachel Cohn

98. “We were people, and people had ways of finding each other.”

— Rachel Cohn

99. “How come princesses always have some huge flaw that can cause their downfall?”

— Rachel Cohn

100. “Nick is right, the Olsen twins do have a worrisome co-dependent relationship. I understand those bitches, though, I really do.”

— Rachel Cohn