Top 160 Rebecca Makkai Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

65. “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

66. “Well here it was, then: longing, missing. The most useless kind of love.”

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

68. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “The thing is, if you stop blaming people and everything’s still crap, the only thing left is to blame the world. And when you blame the whole world, when it seems like the planet doesn’t want you, and if there’s a God, he hates you – that’s worse than hating yourself. It is.”

— Rebecca Makkai

78. “This disease has magnified all our mistakes.”

— Rebecca Makkai

79. “It hit him now that he’d outlive Charlie, that he’d be the one looking back on this in fifty years, telling Charlie’s story to someone just as Nora had told Ranko’s to him.”

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

81. “Don’t get me wrong: I wanted your head on a pike. I was just willing to wait.”

— Rebecca Makkai

82. “These kids were young enough that the stroke of twelve still connoted mischief, parties, ghosts, rather than work deadlines and colicky babies and red-eye flights.”

— Rebecca Makkai

83. “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

84. “Time travel is so easy! It’s devastatingly easy! All you have to do is live long enough!”

— Rebecca Makkai

85. “Our bridges can no longer withstand your gestures of love.”

— Rebecca Makkai

86. “Beth Docherty seemed wealthy and bored, a stay-at-home mom using social media to sell essential oils for money that, from the look of her house, she didn’t need.”

— Rebecca Makkai

87. “The real Omar, spending the rest of his life in prison. And while Yahav might not have been convinced yet of his innocence, Yahav didn’t know about you.”

— Rebecca Makkai

88. “Asher said, “Does it really ever go anywhere?” “Does what?” “Love. Does it vanish?” Yale looked at his own hand, resting on the dashboard to keep himself steady whenever Asher braked suddenly. “I mean, we never want it to. But it does, doesn’t it?” Asher said, “I think that’s the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.”

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

90. “How many times did I have to learn the same lesson? You’re not special. And that’s okay.”

— Rebecca Makkai

91. “He wanted to bathe in if for five seconds, the future he might be having if it weren’t for everything.”

— Rebecca Makkai

92. “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

93. “And Yahav appeared regularly on Britt and Alder’s show, speaking to the legal side of things. He was still married to his wife. He was still beautiful.”

— Rebecca Makkai

94. “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

95. “And you are never reasonable when you are in love.”

— Rebecca Makkai

96. “Her voice had run into a wall. She tried again but no sound came out. She said, “It would’ve been easier if he’d said something funny.” They all laughed, just to add their voices to the room, to get her through this.”

— Rebecca Makkai

97. “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

98. “He did Choristers and orchestra and Follies and spring musical and taught a few classes.” Jamila said, “They had one person doing all that?” “It was a different place.”

— Rebecca Makkai

99. “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

100. “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