Top 250 Rachel Cohn Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “People who want things to be perfect are always impossible to please. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Even.”

— Rachel Cohn

102. “I think it’s time to experience life outside the notebook.”

— Rachel Cohn

103. “The humans create life, and senselessly cause death. For nothing.”

— Rachel Cohn

104. “I don’t think it’s a matter of ready-I mean, not in an all-the-way sense. You’re never completely ready-you just get to the point where you’re ready enough.”

— Rachel Cohn

105. “But whether or not you are here, you are here – because these words are for you, and they wouldn’t exist if you weren’t here in some way. This notebook is a strange instrument – the player doesn’t know the music until it’s being played.”

— Rachel Cohn

106. “Children frighten me. I mean, I appreciate them on a cute aesthetic level, but they’re very demanding and unreasonable creatures and often smell funny.”

— Rachel Cohn

107. “She doesn’t want the boy causing the distinction between “love” and “in love.”

— Rachel Cohn

108. “One of the failures of cellular communication is that tiredness often comes across as sadness.”

— Rachel Cohn

109. “I kiss her and she finds the light switch and turns it off, and we’re just lit in Pepsi-can colors and it’s like we’ve finally found this other kind of conversation, this conversation in gestures and pulls and pushes and breaths and grasps and teases and glimmers and rubs and expectation.”

— Rachel Cohn

110. “So he’s worth a second shot? The more apt question, my dear, is: are you?”

— Rachel Cohn

111. “I don’t know what boldness came over me, but the resolute heaviness of Dash’s demeanor threatened to crush my soul. My pinky finger crept over and nestled against his, for comfort. Like a magnet, his pinky finger latched onto and intertwined with mine. I like magnets a whole lot.”

— Rachel Cohn

112. “People are like that, judging you before they know you.”

— Rachel Cohn

113. “I’m not that girl who randomly meets a guy one night and has her life change. I wear cords and flannel shirts. I don’t have the killer body like Tris or Caroline. Sometimes I don’t wash my hair for three days and sometimes I don’t floss.”

— Rachel Cohn

114. “At last I had it – the Christmas present I’d wanted all along, but hadn’t realized. His words.”

— Rachel Cohn

115. “Unfortunately, now that Langston has a boyfriend again, he has forgotten all about me.”

— Rachel Cohn

116. “What else could I be? If I were a mono-thinker, I probably wouldn’t be an insomniac. How is a poly-thinker supposed to fall asleep, and more importantly, stay asleep, when thoughts just won’t stop darting! darting! darting! through my head?”

— Rachel Cohn

117. “We’re better off. But I don’t know if the world’s better off. I don’t know if the two are the same thing.”

— Rachel Cohn

118. “Yes, girls want their princes, but boys want their princesses just as much.”

— Rachel Cohn

119. “Without Laura here, food is the only thing I love that loves me back.”

— Rachel Cohn

120. “It’s always the ones who believe who are hurt the most when things go wrong. She.”

— Rachel Cohn

121. “I knew she was leaving. I knew we were never going to date long-distance. I knew that we wouldn’t have been able to be like this back when we were dating, so there was no use in regretting what hasn’t happened. I suspected that what happens in hotel rooms rarely lasts outside of them. I suspected that when something was a beginning and an ending at the same time, that meant it could only exist in the present.”

— Rachel Cohn

122. “I love you for answering the call of a red notebook once upon a time.”

— Rachel Cohn

123. “Like dogs and lions, small children can sense fear. The slightest flinch, the slightest disinclination, and they will jump atop you and devour you.”

— Rachel Cohn

124. “I am a classic ‘Star Trek’ fanatic.”

— Rachel Cohn

125. “I wondered what kind of monsters lurked in theaters to prey on people sitting by themselves because their brothers wouldn’t get out of bed to take them to the movies.”

— Rachel Cohn

126. “But I couldn’t concentrate on writing in the notebook. I wanted to live inside it, not write in it.”

— Rachel Cohn

127. “Driver, can you tell him that I’m sorry? I wasn’t supposed to be like this. I swear.”

— Rachel Cohn

128. “There’s an alone that calls out for rescue – but this appeared to be an alone that wanted to be left alone.”

— Rachel Cohn

129. “Dumped doesn’t even begin to describe it. If you’re going to use a trash metaphor, incinerated is more like it.”

— Rachel Cohn

130. “Can we try to be wise with each other for a very long time?”

— Rachel Cohn

131. “I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable.”

— Rachel Cohn

132. “Usually my characters, though young, tend to be street-wise.”

— Rachel Cohn

133. “It is possibly true what Grandpa’s buddies have repeatedly told me: Teenage boys cannot be trusted. Their intentions are not pure.”

— Rachel Cohn

134. “I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep.”

— Rachel Cohn

135. “Just because a person is beautiful doesn’t mean there’s no soul beneath. Doesn.”

— Rachel Cohn

136. “Love teaches you that fitting is overrated; what you need to do is change the shape of your life to make the connection.”

— Rachel Cohn

137. “No one would want to read a book in which I explain the science of cloning because it would be very dull and it would also make no sense.”

— Rachel Cohn

138. “No. I can’t change. I shouldn’t change.”

— Rachel Cohn

139. “I walked inside Macy’s and faced the pathetic spectacle of a department store full of shoppers, none of whom were shopping for themselves. Without the instant gratification of a self-aimed purchase, everyone walked around in the tactical stupor of the financially obligated.”

— Rachel Cohn

140. “Of course you want to get to know her. But at the same time, you want to feel like you already know her. That you will know her instantly. Such a fairy tale.”

— Rachel Cohn

141. “That’s funny. I’ve always liked Naomi’s version of me the best. I’m always much more interesting when she talks about me.”

— Rachel Cohn

142. “I love a man who doesn’t let go of the leash, even when it leads him to ruin.”

— Rachel Cohn

143. “Because I hadn’t known that I knew these things. Just having a notebook to write them in, and having someone to write them to, made them all rise to the surface.”

— Rachel Cohn

144. “There’s no way for me to know she’ll find me here. I didn’t call. I didn’t text. I left it up to old connection, that old friendship sense.”

— Rachel Cohn

145. “From a distance, a clone’s luminous eyes are meant to draw in humans and make them feel safe. Up close, the eyes appear hollow. Because of that, humans tend not to look into our eyes too closely, which I’ve been told is socially preferable, as eyes without souls behind them can be frightening.”

— Rachel Cohn

146. “All the librarians turned their heads to me in a collective shush. “I’m afraid you have to survive library school, put up with the general public on a daily basis, and endure several years of budget cuts in order to deserve these drinks,” Chris told me kindly. “But someday, Dash, all this will be yours! We know how to spot ’em, and you’re a young, temporarily one-eyed librarian in the rough!”

— Rachel Cohn

147. “I love the way you look when reading a book – content and dreamy, off in another world.”

— Rachel Cohn

148. “The drapery was so thick and the furniture so cloaked that I half expected to find Sherlock Holmes thumb-wrestling with Jane Austen in the corner. It wasn’t as dusty or smoky as one expects a parlor to be, but all the wood had the weight of card catalogs and the fabric seemed soaked in wine. Knee-high sculptures perched in corners and by the fireplace, while jacketless books crowded on shelves, peering down like old professors too tired to speak to one another.”

— Rachel Cohn

149. “I realized that Snarl had given me what I asked for as a Christmas present. Hope and belief. I’d always hoped but never believed that I could have such an adventure on my own. That I could own it. And love it. But it had happened. The notebook had made it so.”

— Rachel Cohn

150. “They were tricky, those demons. Could they be trusted? Of course they could be trusted. She’d created them. She owned them. They wouldn’t lead her astray.”

— Rachel Cohn