Top 160 Rebecca Makkai Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Don’t get me wrong: I wanted your head on a pike. I was just willing to wait.”

— Rebecca Makkai

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

108. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

122. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

124. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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