Top 160 Rebecca Makkai Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

104. “Being on an airplane, even in coach, was the closest an adult could come to the splendid helplessness of infancy.”

— Rebecca Makkai

105. “I thought of a friend in La who’d said recently of her own daughter, “It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what is coming. Seventh grade is going to hit like a wall. It feels like fattening a pig for slaughter.” But what was the alternative? Starving the pig?”

— Rebecca Makkai

106. “The thing is, I wanted to be a muse. It had to do with my own art, the way it wasn’t expressing the losses I felt. And if I couldn’t paint it all myself, maybe someone could paint my soul. It was a stab at immortality of course.”

— Rebecca Makkai

107. “They posited that one night, high on drugs and jealous over her ongoing relationship with Robbie Serenho, he lost it – and everything about his ex came flooding back until in a fit of rage he strangled Thalia, bashed her head on something hard, changed her into that swimsuit, threw her unconscious body into the pool.”

— Rebecca Makkai

108. “The thought came to Yale, as Dr. Cheng listened to his lungs, that this could be the man presiding over his final days. That in walking through his door, he’d potentially chosen a partnership more permanent than any other in his life. Till death do us part.”

— Rebecca Makkai

109. “People take their reasons with them, don’t they?”

— Rebecca Makkai

110. “She’s just a fundamentally angry human.”

— Rebecca Makkai

111. “People would move on. Trump would say something dangerously idiotic any moment now, and everyone’s attention would turn.”

— Rebecca Makkai

112. “Mike was an interesting case study: someone with a career’s worth of experience in human rights, who still couldn’t quite handle justice if it would affect his buddy.”

— Rebecca Makkai

113. “In another universe, I kissed Geoff then. In that other universe, I understood that I was not disgusting, that Geoff might have welcomed it or in any case would at least have been flattered. I’d have let down my guard, allowed myself to like a real and attainable person, rather than dead musicians and the hottest boy at Granby. But in the real world, it never crossed my mind.”

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

122. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

124. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

132. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

140. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai