Top 160 Rebecca Makkai Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Well here it was, then: longing, missing. The most useless kind of love.”

— Rebecca Makkai

52. “Yale asked if he still considered himself Mormon and Roman grimaced, hesitated. “They make it really hard to leave. It’s like trying to quit Columbia House.”

— Rebecca Makkai

53. “We hugged like old friends, because we were. You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.”

— Rebecca Makkai

54. “Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin.”

— Rebecca Makkai

55. “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

56. “That’s the difference between optimism and naievty. No one in this room is naive. Naive people haven’t been through real trials yet, so they think it could never happen to them. Optimists have been through it already, and we keep getting up each day because we believe we can keep it from happening again. Or we trick ourselves into thinking it.”

— Rebecca Makkai

57. “We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.”

— Rebecca Makkai

58. “Walk into any place like you belong, and you will.”

— Rebecca Makkai

59. “There was a line, a solid line, between Thalia and someone like Jasmine Wilde. A line of age, a line of agency. And there was a world of difference between you and Jerome.”

— Rebecca Makkai

60. “And I’m sorry to hate you this much. But, Bodie, I hate you so much. You set this all in motion, and now I have to face these people. My husband is having surgery this week, and I should be focusing on that, and instead I’m here. I’d like to just keep living my life. I hate you for bringing me back here.”

— Rebecca Makkai

61. “I feel like such an idiot. That I ever thought I could have a really good life.”

— Rebecca Makkai

62. “What happens when your only escape is the same thing you’re trying to escape? Here’s the soundtrack of your tragedy: Dance to it. 54.”

— Rebecca Makkai

63. “It was the one where she walked around in her skin and her bones for the rest of her life but her body was never recovered. You know the one.”

— Rebecca Makkai

64. “I was back in love the instant I saw him. It’s the strangest thing, isn’t it, to find someone again after a great deal of time. Your brain resets itself to the last time you saw them.”

— Rebecca Makkai

65. “Nora said, “Every time I’ve gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I’ve thought about the works that weren’t there. Shadow-paintings, you know, that no one can see but you. But there are all these happy young people around you and you realize no, they’re not bereft. They don’t see the empty spaces.”

— Rebecca Makkai

66. “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?”

— Rebecca Makkai

67. “Well, if you were going to be miserable, you could be miserable anywhere. She’d known that for years: the way one person could starve to death at the banquet, the way you could sob through the funniest movie.”

— Rebecca Makkai

68. “You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.”

— Rebecca Makkai

69. “You get afraid of one thing, and suddenly you’re afraid of everything.”

— Rebecca Makkai

70. “I think about this a lot. When someone asks if I liked boarding school, I can no longer base my answer, my judgment, on the people I knew. Once, I might have thought of you. I might have thought of any number of people who weren’t what I once believed. But I can still love the place itself, as a place, as smells and echoes and angles of light, as surfaces etched deep with their own history.”

— Rebecca Makkai

71. “If he could get through another week like this, then another -if he could stand here at the end of the month and congratulate himself again on getting through in one piece, then he could keep doing it forever.”

— Rebecca Makkai

72. “My point is, you were a part of the machine: an arm, a leg. You drove the getaway car. You threw bricks through the window and someone else grabbed the jewelry. You distracted the feds while the spies got away. You held her down while someone else beat her. You shot the deer and wounded it. When the second hunter came along, the deer could no longer run.”

— Rebecca Makkai

73. “Optimists have been through it already, and we keep getting up each day because we believe we can keep it from happening again.”

— Rebecca Makkai

74. “I could tell you their names, but it wouldn’t mean a thing to you. If I told you Picasso died in the war, you’d understand. Poof, there goes Guernica. But I tell you Jacques Weiss died at the Somme, and you don’t know what to miss.”

— Rebecca Makkai

75. “Time passed strangely. Five minutes spent staring at his empty bookshelves took around five years of psychic time, while the twenty minutes he spent talking to Donna the docent out in the gallery flew by too fast, and then he was at his desk again, staring at infinity.”

— Rebecca Makkai

76. “She remembered something her own mother had told her one of the last times they’d really talked, right before Nico died. Fiona had been blaming her for not standing up to her husband, for letting him kick Nico out. They were in the hospital cafeteria. Her mother said, “You’ll never know anyone’s marriage but your own. And even then, you’ll only know half of it.”

— Rebecca Makkai

77. “He tried to see it this way, tried to look at the gifts he’d just been handed: his life, his health, the freedom to move across the globe.”

— Rebecca Makkai

78. “Research has always been my happy place. It might be related to my sometime collecting of facts about my peers, an attempt to feel safer by mapping the world. If I can chart everything around me as far as I can see, then I must be in the middle of it all, real and in one piece. You are here.”

— Rebecca Makkai

79. “Aren’t these the same people who believe in rehabilitation? Honestly, if I’d shot someone in a robbery fifteen years ago, they’d be fighting for everyone to forgive me. They’d say I learned from my mistakes.”

— Rebecca Makkai

80. “But I’d learned long ago not to counter people’s trauma with my own.”

— Rebecca Makkai

81. “At 6:30 each evening, Julian would appear in the living room to turn on Wheel of Fortune... when the winner went shopping in the little showcase after each round, Julian would wonder aloud if the person would choose the Dalmatian statue. That was the extent of his engagement.”

— Rebecca Makkai

82. “She siad, “What a nightmare.” She made her face empathic, and then she turned her magazine page. She could’ve said, I’ve got bigger problems than you, buddy. She could’ve said, There are worse things to lose.”

— Rebecca Makkai

83. “My instinct in these situations is to sit back and listen and learn – but they were looking at me like I was supposed to solve it all. This was fragile, and these were fragile kids. And I felt derailed: I’d spilled this idea about you, and it had just vanished into a fog of adolescent angst and white guilt.”

— Rebecca Makkai

84. “What have you heard about Charlie?” He wasn’t sure it was healthy to ask. He wanted to know what Teresa was going through, and how the paper was doing, and if Charlie missed him. He wanted to know if Charlie was still skulking around the city. He wanted a full-color diagram of Charlie’s heart and all its failures.”

— Rebecca Makkai

85. “Without expectation, without hope, a crush could remain pure and platonic. It was never lustful, never selfish.”

— Rebecca Makkai

86. “Whatever happens -in three years, in twenty- that moment will remain.”

— Rebecca Makkai

87. “Not a single cell of his body was the same as it had been in 1995. But he was still himself, just as I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there.”

— Rebecca Makkai

88. “She was mature – which I’m sure made her more appealing to you. If you’d been interested in someone truly mature, you wouldn’t have spent time with a teenager, but her maturity was probably a convenient excuse. Maybe you told yourself she was an old soul. I’m sure you told yourself she knew what she was doing.”

— Rebecca Makkai

89. “You think the dead control us.” “Sure.” “I’m gonna tell you a secret,” she said, and he rolled onto his side. She had fresh gauze on her hand, and she picked at the edge. “We’re in charge of them. I mean, my friend Julian? When I thought he was dead, all the things we’d ever said to each other, all my memories of him, they were mine. One of the weirdest things about seeing him again was that something left me. Some kind of energy. Like the air whooshing out of a balloon.”

— Rebecca Makkai

90. “Let’s not fall apart over something that hasn’t happened yet.”

— Rebecca Makkai

91. “It was when I began starving my body to the point that, by spring, I couldn’t row a Girl Scout canoe, let alone compete in sprint season. From this distance, it was clear: I had been in the process of erasing my body. It wasn’t.”

— Rebecca Makkai

92. “She laughed with the desperate air of someone who didn’t want the conversation to turn uninteresting lest you leave her alone with no one to talk to.”

— Rebecca Makkai

93. “The hell of imprisonment isn’t the terrible food, it’s the lack of choice of food. It isn’t the cold, wet floor, it’s that you can’t choose another place to stand. It isn’t the confinement so much as the fact of never running, never getting in your car and speeding off, as Omar loved to do.”

— Rebecca Makkai

94. “The dosage of my antidepressant is such that I haven’t cried actual tears in a decade, but there are times when I want so badly to cry that I make all the noises of crying, press my fists into my eyes so I feel something similar. The absence of tears hurts more – or makes whatever hurts hurt more – than if I could just sob.”

— Rebecca Makkai

95. “He took his eyes off of traffic long enough to look at Yale, and Yale’s face did involuntary things.”

— Rebecca Makkai

96. “The great thing about ten-year-olds is they don’t balk at non sequiturs.”

— Rebecca Makkai

97. “Or maybe it was just that he wanted to believe in a world where this apartment still existed, where it was forever 1985, where the door might open at any moment and there would be Julian with a party invitation, Terrence with beer, Nico with a new comic for Charlie.”

— Rebecca Makkai

98. “But being bad at relationships, that’s worse than murder. I don’t get it. I want to stay home and never talk to people ever again.”

— Rebecca Makkai

99. “They had failed to follow up with those same witnesses – and they’d never talked to me, a person who could have decoded Thalia’s planner.”

— Rebecca Makkai

100. “Although, I reminded myself, the fact that you didn’t cross boundaries with me doesn’t mean you didn’t do it with girls less guarded, less wrapped in barbed wire.”

— Rebecca Makkai