Top 160 Rebecca Makkai Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “He looked for Terrence, to see how he was holding up, but he wasn’t in the chair by the wall anymore. Nico must have taken him home. No. No, Nico had not taken him home.”

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

104. “The kids were to bring one hundred of something, and to dress like old people. Lest any twenty-first-century mother find a moment not devoted to proving maternal devotion through crafts.”

— Rebecca Makkai

105. “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

106. “This sounded plausible in all but the interpretation – the kind of thing Jerome might have done when buzzed.”

— Rebecca Makkai

107. “Back at Granby, everything was still – a snow globe no one had shaken in days.”

— Rebecca Makkai

108. “Whatever bond had been forced upon Fiona and Cecily in Yale’s hospital room didn’t have lasting power; trauma wasn’t always the best glue.”

— Rebecca Makkai

109. “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

110. “You think you can’t go home again? It’s the only place you can ever go.”

— Rebecca Makkai

111. “He was a flirt, I knew that and liked it. But never creepy. His method was to grin, crinkle his eyes, bite his lip, caress the bowl of his wineglass. Not to rub shoulders or talk to boobs or hover with onion breath.”

— Rebecca Makkai

112. “I cared a about the details. Not because they were something I could control, but because they were something I could own. And there was so little that was mine.”

— Rebecca Makkai

113. “And I really used to believe we’d be the last generation... I was thinking about the whole planet. And now it’s like no... You’re the one who’s gonna miss out. Not even the end of the world... but just the normal stuff.”

— Rebecca Makkai

114. “I wanted to paint him, that was my first thought, but the next instant I was smitten. I’d never understood it before, how artists fall for their muses. I thought it was just a bunch of men who couldn’t keep it in their pants. But there was something about the need to paint him and the need to possess him – they were the same impulse.”

— Rebecca Makkai

115. “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

116. “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

117. “As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people – of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they’d ever represented, every promise.”

— Rebecca Makkai

118. “There were older people you couldn’t imagine young, and there were those whose faces still held on to what they’d looked like at twenty-five.”

— Rebecca Makkai

119. “But the moony expression on Roman’s face, his voice, had hit the darkest spot of Yale’s humor. How beautiful, the doomed love! How gorgeous and ambient, the ways we abandon each other! The lovely wars we die in, the poetry of disease!”

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

121. “What it was, I had a crush on the two of you together. Not in a porny way, not like – it was the two of you as a duo. You were always having so much fun.”

— Rebecca Makkai

122. “Those Reddit detectives would have had a field day in here. They’d have whipped out their measuring tapes, their calculators.”

— Rebecca Makkai

123. “It’s been a long time since I had a day that just cuts your life in two.”

— Rebecca Makkai

124. “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

125. “I’ve always been happiest when I can sit in the dark, when I can turn off my own life and watch a story unfold.”

— Rebecca Makkai

126. “All they need to do is vaguely suggest it. They’re likely to paint you as a nosy person, overinvolved, trying to make a name for yourself. Their goal is to get the judge to dislike you.”

— Rebecca Makkai

127. “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

128. “We’re gonna need new leaders all the time. The problem with this movement is the leaders keep dying. We gotta have subs.”

— Rebecca Makkai

129. “Or maybe it was because it wasn’t happening primarily to the gay community there, wasn’t only killing beautiful young men who reminded her of Nico and his friends.”

— Rebecca Makkai

130. “Just because you can’t picture someone doing something doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of it.”

— Rebecca Makkai

131. “The term rabbit hole makes us think of Alice plummeting straight down, but what I mean is an actual rabbit warren, the kind with endless looping tunnels, branching paths, all the accompanying claustrophobia.”

— Rebecca Makkai

132. “Claire allows that.”

— Rebecca Makkai

133. “Charlie said, “I don’t deserve you.” He was looking into the fridge like it held King Tut’s treasures. Yale said, “Remember that, next time I leave the window open and it rains.”

— Rebecca Makkai

134. “This project was undertaken with a great deal of ongoing thought and conversation and concern about the line between allyship and appropriation – a line that might feel different to different readers. It is my great hope that this book will lead the curious to read direct, personal accounts of the AIDS crisis – and that any places where I’ve gotten the details wrong might inspire people to tell their own stories.”

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

136. “For a teenager, being seen a certain way is as good as being that way.”

— Rebecca Makkai

137. “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

138. “Oh, Jerome. I would have stopped him if I’d seen that, would have explained on the way home why that was inappropriate.”

— Rebecca Makkai

139. “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

140. “She’d figure it out herself, sooner or later-the way a person could change, and yet you couldn’t let go of your initial conception. How the man who was once perfect for you could become trapped inside a stranger.”

— Rebecca Makkai

141. “The fact that a fever could just be a fever now, a cough could just be a cough, a rash could just be a rash – it was a gift the test had given them. This was where Asher was wrong; knowledge was, in some cases, a bliss.”

— Rebecca Makkai

142. “Alder stood, brushed off his jeans. He said, “I’m a Black man in America. My hopes aren’t up.”

— Rebecca Makkai

143. “The need to keep busy is both a symptom of high-functioning anxiety and the key to my success.”

— Rebecca Makkai

144. “Adler struck me as a hugely creative kid who’d gotten the unfortunate message early on that there was always a right answer.”

— Rebecca Makkai

145. “You have to accept that, at least: beneath everything, despite a privileged life and a sense of humor, I was an angry person.”

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

147. “And who was he kidding? It wasn’t love. It was attraction. It was a seed that might have grown, given better soil, more sun.”

— Rebecca Makkai

148. “He went back to the kiss in his mind. He could live there a long time. It was warm there and good.”

— Rebecca Makkai

149. “Inserting themselves into someone else’s story any way possible?”

— Rebecca Makkai

150. “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