Top 160 Rebecca Makkai Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep.”

— Rebecca Makkai

2. “Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess.”

— Rebecca Makkai

3. “But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory – letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love.”

— Rebecca Makkai

4. “If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But listen: You two are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That’s a miracle. I just want to say that.”

— Rebecca Makkai

5. “You’ll never know anyone’s marriage but your own. And even then, you’ll only know half of it.”

— Rebecca Makkai

6. “There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it’s true. Not that they had bad intentions, just... you always want to believe you’re important in someone’s life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren’t.”

— Rebecca Makkai

7. “He said, “Everyone knows how short life is. Fiona and I know it especially. But no one ever talks about how long it is.”

— Rebecca Makkai

8. “It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it’s always only temporary.”

— Rebecca Makkai

9. “She wanted to call Claire over, show her these photos, tell her what Julian had just said, try to explain, or to try to start to explain, what her life had been. How this show might begin to convey it all, the palimpsest that was her heart, the way things could be written over but never erased. She was simply never going to be a blank slate.”

— Rebecca Makkai

10. “She turned her tiramisu slab on its side to cut it better. She had nearly forgotten who she was.”

— Rebecca Makkai

11. “If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple.”

— Rebecca Makkai

12. “I hate that we have to live in the middle of history. We make enough mess on our own.”

— Rebecca Makkai

13. “Ageism is the only self-correcting prejudice, isn’t it?”

— Rebecca Makkai

14. “It’s been a long time since I had a day that just cuts your life in two. Like, this hangnail on my thumb, I had it yesterday. It’s the same hangnail, and I’m a completely different person.”

— Rebecca Makkai

15. “I think that’s the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.”

— Rebecca Makkai

16. “He said, “It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it’s always only temporary.” 1986 Roman had a scar on the meat of his left arm from his smallpox vaccine: an indented circle made of a thousand tiny dots.”

— Rebecca Makkai

17. “A handful of dead astronauts and Reagan weeps with the nation. Thirteen thousand dead gay men and Reagan’s too busy.”

— Rebecca Makkai

18. “You should know we had so much joy as well! But when you build a story down, you end up with something macabre. All stories end the same way, don’t they.”

— Rebecca Makkai

19. “If you had to choose when, in the timeline of the earth, you got to live – wouldn’t you choose the end? You haven’t missed anything, then. You die in 1920, you miss rock and roll. You die in 1600, you miss Mozart. Right? I mean, the horrors pile up, too, but no one wants to die before the end of the story.”

— Rebecca Makkai

20. “Ridiculous, but better than feeling like you lived in some alternate universe where no one could hear you calling for help. Now it was like people could hear and just didn’t care. But wasn’t that progress?”

— Rebecca Makkai

21. “They meant well, all of them. How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?”

— Rebecca Makkai

22. “Eddie was so controlled, so careful. His eyes, though – the way they pulsed around the room and then back to your face – it was as if they were taking in everything with such tremendous force, such thirst. A good chance this was the reason for his quiet. There was so much pouring in that nothing could come out.”

— Rebecca Makkai

23. “But what a burden. To be Horatio. To be the one with the memory.”

— Rebecca Makkai

24. “If the house hadn’t been a mansion, if the death hadn’t been a suicide, if Violet Devohr’s dark, refined beauty hadn’t smoldered down from that massive oil portrait, it wouldn’t have been a ghost story at all. Beauty and wealth, it seems, get you as far in the afterlife as they do here on earth. We can’t all afford to be ghosts.”

— Rebecca Makkai

25. “It had been winter for so long that the air didn’t hurt anymore.”

— Rebecca Makkai

26. “We aren’t haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we’d be to them.”

— Rebecca Makkai

27. “She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she’d been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this.”

— Rebecca Makkai

28. “He’d been walking on eggshells for this man, and meanwhile Charlie, behind Yale’s back, had just been throwing the eggs straight at the wall.”

— Rebecca Makkai

29. “He wanted to spend the rest of his life building Nora’s Paris out of sugar cubes, brick by brick. He wanted a one-way ticket to 1920. He thought about Nora’s idea of time travel. What a horrible kind of travel, that took you only forward into the terrifying future, constantly farther from whatever had once made you happy. Only maybe that wasn’t what she’d meant. Maybe she meant the older you got, the more decades you had at your disposal to revisit with your eyes closed.”

— Rebecca Makkai

30. “Someone had once told her that if a man sees the line of a woman’s suntan – the strip of white peeking out beneath the strap of her bathing suit or the collar of her dress – he’ll fall in love with her. Because he will believe he’s seen her truest self, raw and pale, something no other man knows. And this was the reason she’d fallen in love with George: She could see the desperate nerves beneath the bluster.”

— Rebecca Makkai

31. “There were probably too many exclamation points, but I couldn’t bear to erase them. I wanted to take shelter behind their manic enthusiasm, their idiotic sparkle.”

— Rebecca Makkai

32. “It helped that his accent contained a top hat and monocle.”

— Rebecca Makkai

33. “If there was a common thread between the great warriors and runaways of my Hulkinov ancestors, and my father the pathological expatriate, and me, it was just that: hotheaded self-righteousness. And not the bad kind, either. We actually were right. We just cared more about being right than doing what was right. And we cared more about being right than about our own lives.”

— Rebecca Makkai

34. “What I care is, now they elect right wing across Europe. And then, yes: You, me, all of us, we’re screwed. Everyone acts from fear, the next year, two years. What happens, you think, to people like us?” Fiona felt herself sinking. She said, “Things might seem different in the morning.” Serge wheeled on her. “When people are afraid, we get the Christian Taliban. We get it here, you get it there, and we’re all in jail. We’re all in jail.”

— Rebecca Makkai

35. “We’d been through something our parents hadn’t. The war made us older than our parents. And when you’re older than your parents, what are you going to do? Who’s going to show you how to live?”

— Rebecca Makkai

36. “He faced the house, closed his eyes, and he put his hand on the rolled-up cuff of Asher’s shirt. He wanted to bathe in it for five seconds, the future he might be having if it weren’t for everything.”

— Rebecca Makkai

37. “This disease has magnified all our mistakes. Some stupid thing you did when you were nineteen, the one time you weren’t careful. And it turns out that was the most important day of your life.”

— Rebecca Makkai

38. “And for what portion of human history had people even had desk jobs? Maybe the last four hundred years, out of four million? It wasn’t natural.”

— Rebecca Makkai

39. “I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved.”

— Rebecca Makkai

40. “And when you came here from Heaven, you left the door open so he could go out.”

— Rebecca Makkai

41. “He’d be the world’s luckiest man to stand there at the end of it all, to be the one left, trying to remember. The unluckiest too.”

— Rebecca Makkai

42. “If everything else were still the same, he’d have felt Zee’s absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been.”

— Rebecca Makkai

43. “If you learned new details about someone who was gone, then he wasn’t vanishing.”

— Rebecca Makkai

44. “Whenever I feel guilty about something when I was young, my mother would say- How do you make up for it? What’s a thing you could do that would make you feel better?”

— Rebecca Makkai

45. “This is a nation of runaways. Every person comes from somewhere else. Even the Indians, they run once upon a time across the Alaskan land bridge. The blacks, they maybe didn’t run from Africa, okay, but they ran from slavery. And the rest of us, we all ran from something. From the church, the state, the parents, the Irish potato bug. And I think this is why Americans are so restless.”

— Rebecca Makkai

46. “You made my year,” he said. “You and your artist-schtupping aunt.”

— Rebecca Makkai

47. “To know that somebody was longing for you was the world’s strongest aphrodisiac.”

— Rebecca Makkai

48. “There was this tiny window where we were safer, and happier. I thought it was the beginning of something, when really it was the end.”

— Rebecca Makkai

49. “Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.”

— Rebecca Makkai

50. “At the Bistro, Yale felt entitled to joy. Even if he was just watching from the wall, drink in hand. This, the Bistro announced, was a town where good things would happen. Chicago would unfurl its map to him one promising street, one intoxicating space, at a time. It would weave him into its grid, pour beer in his mouth and music in his ears. It would keep him.”

— Rebecca Makkai