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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

103. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

105. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

113. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

121. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

138. “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

139. “Claire allows that.”

— Rebecca Makkai

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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