Top 160 Rebecca Makkai Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

106. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

115. “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

116. “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

117. “These plants below were lucky, the early arrivals. The ones born later to a choked summer ravine would have to fight for sun and space. Plenty would make it. Everything green is something that’s survived.”

— Rebecca Makkai

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

121. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “Things are moving!” Alder said. “Things are shaking.” I said, “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.” Alder stood, brushed off his jeans. He said, “I’m a Black man in America. My hopes aren’t up.”

— Rebecca Makkai

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

— Rebecca Makkai

129. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

131. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai

149. “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

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

— Rebecca Makkai