Top 120 Rebecca Serle Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “There is no simple beauty in perfection.”

— Rebecca Serle

52. “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”

— Rebecca Serle

53. “I thought it meant he saw truth in things that were frivolous, and frivolity in things that were fundamental.”

— Rebecca Serle

54. “The difference between being good and bad at something is just interest,” Carol says.”

— Rebecca Serle

55. “Now, on the other side of midnight, we do not yet know what is coming. So be it. So let it be.”

— Rebecca Serle

56. “But you are,” she says. “I wish you knew that. I wish you understood that you could have love beyond your wildest dreams. Stuff movies are made of. You’re meant for that, too.” “I don’t think I am.” “You are. You know how I know?” I shake my head. “Because that’s the way you love me.”

— Rebecca Serle

57. “Maybe she knew. Maybe she knew there wasn’t time to waste, that she couldn’t go through the motions, steps, build. That the linear trajectory would bring her only to the middle.”

— Rebecca Serle

58. “The mere act of taking a chance, of changing, is by definition an act of evolution. And when we evolve, we grow. And that’s the point.”

— Rebecca Serle

59. “There is more to life than just continuing to do what we know. What got you here won’t get you there.”

— Rebecca Serle

60. “Here was this girl, my best friend, who fit in this faraway place like a hand to a glove. I didn’t, and yet she still took me with her. She was always taking me with her, wanting me to be. part of her wide, open life. How could I feel anything but lucky?”

— Rebecca Serle

61. “The thing about life,” she says, “is that sometimes the roads that seem impossible just have some rocks in your way. They’re not boulders, they’re just rocks. You can move them. You are strong enough.”

— Rebecca Serle

62. “So be it, so let it be.”

— Rebecca Serle

63. “Life is growth. If we stop growing, we are as good as dead.”

— Rebecca Serle

64. “Even inaction is a choice.”

— Rebecca Serle

65. “Here is the thing no one tells you about cancer: they ease you into it. After the initial shock, after the diagnosis and the terror, they put you on the slow conveyor belt. They start you off nice and easy. You want some lemon water with that chemo? You got it. Radiation? No problem, everyone does it, it’s practically weed. We’ll serve you those chemicals with a smile. You’ll love them, you’ll see.”

— Rebecca Serle

66. “It’s that they never had any interest in being parents. They had Bella because having children was a thing they thought you should do, but they didn’t want to raise her, not really.”

— Rebecca Serle

67. “I was her protector. That she was flighty and irresponsible and frivolous. That it was my job to protect her. That I was the strong one, counterbalancing her weakness, her whimsy. But I was wrong. I wasn’t the strong one, she was. Because this is what it feels like – to take a risk, to step out of line, to make decisions not based on fact but on feeling. And it hurts. It feels like a tornado raging inside my soul. It feels like I may not survive it.”

— Rebecca Serle

68. “I hope you’ll understand someday that just because you become a mother doesn’t mean you stop being a woman.”

— Rebecca Serle

69. “But you’re not in love with him. You may have been at first, but if you were I never really saw it, and I don’t have the luxury of pretending anymore. And what I realized is that you don’t, either. If there’s a clock ticking toward anything, it should be your happiness.”

— Rebecca Serle

70. “Here is what I remember him saying: Kindness before honesty. We are taught that honesty is the most important quality. Tell the truth. Do not lie. Etc. But there are so many instances when honesty isn’t kind. When the kinder thing to do is to keep what you have to say to yourself. Tobias didn’t understand that. He told me everything. Eventually, so did I. But as the honesty grew, so did the cruelty. Sometimes I thought we were being honest just to see how deep we could cut.”

— Rebecca Serle

71. “I miss her I miss her I miss her. I miss her warmth and her guidance and the sound of her voice. I miss her telling me it was really all going to be okay and believing it, because she was at the wheel. I miss her hugs and her laughter and her lipstick, Clinique Black Honey. I miss the way she could plan a party in under an hour. I miss having the answers, because I had her.”

— Rebecca Serle

72. “I’ve always been waiting, haven’t I? For tragedy to show up once again on my doorstep. Evil that blindsides. And what is cancer if not that? If not the manifestation of everything I’ve spent my life trying to ward off.”

— Rebecca Serle

73. “I’d like to kiss you,” he says. I hear it in my rib cage. “But I’m not going to unless you tell me it’s okay. I know you’re in a weird spot. I also know we’re here, and there is a very big full moon, and your lips look like watermelon. The good kind. The breakfast kind.”

— Rebecca Serle

74. “The entire town is built around the cove of the sea. It looks like an amphitheater, enjoying the performance of the ocean.”

— Rebecca Serle

75. “But all of that is an hour from now. Now, on the other side of midnight, we do not know yet what is coming. So be it. So let it be.”

— Rebecca Serle

76. “She seemed to love the stage of life she was in – somewhere past all the figuring out. Somewhere solid.”

— Rebecca Serle

77. “Litigating is bending the law to your will, it’s deception, it’s all about perception. Can you convince a jury? Can you make people feel? In deal making, nothing is above the law. The written words are what matters. Everything is there in black and white.”

— Rebecca Serle

78. “Nature has so much power if we just pay attention.”

— Rebecca Serle

79. “Love doesn’t require a future.”

— Rebecca Serle

80. “I imagine being pregnant. Shopping in this store for my own tiny creation. It makes me want a cocktail.”

— Rebecca Serle

81. “There is beauty to the run-down buildings, the laundry strung high overhead, the rhythm and drawl of daily life here. There is beauty, too, in the old Mediterranean architecture, buildings left over from centuries ago, before Naples became what it is today. There is beauty in the discrepancy – two things that seems oppositional, coming together.”

— Rebecca Serle

82. “History is an asset, not a detriment. It’s nice to be with someone who knows you, who knows your history. It will get even more important the longer you live. Learning how to find your way back can be harder than starting over. But damn, if you can, it’s worth it.”

— Rebecca Serle

83. “She made me in her image, but she forgot the most important part. She forgot that one day she’d leave, that she already had, and then I’d be left with nothing. When you’re just a reflection, what happens when the image vanishes?”

— Rebecca Serle

84. “If you want your dreams you should look for abundance, not scarcity.”

— Rebecca Serle

85. “I don’t think bad action makes you a bad person. I think life is far more complicated than that, and it’s reductive to think otherwise.”

— Rebecca Serle

86. “You’re still you, she’s still her. You still have emotions. You’ll still fight. You can try and be perfect, but it will backfire. Just keep being here, instead.”

— Rebecca Serle

87. “I make her life smooth and solid. She makes mine bright and dazzling. This seems fair. A good trade.”

— Rebecca Serle

88. “The magic of Italy seems to be in its ability to connect to some time out of time, some era that is unmarked by modernity. There is so much peacefulness in being present, right here.”

— Rebecca Serle

89. “I see it all. The cascade of our friendship. The decades of time. The decades to come – more, even, without her.”

— Rebecca Serle

90. “It’s possible actions only have the weight we give them,” she says. “We can decide what something means.”

— Rebecca Serle

91. “There is a great life waiting for you at home. It’s beautiful and hard and joyful and real. It will be messy and you’ll get it wrong sometimes You should be more honest when you do – it will help her, your daughter. She doesn’t need you to be perfect; she just needs you to be you. That life is good, Carol, but it may not be the one you want.”

— Rebecca Serle

92. “If you can reach out and hold the other person’s hand, does the distance matter? Is simply being able to see someone valuable?”

— Rebecca Serle

93. “My mother, you see, is the great love of my life. She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her.”

— Rebecca Serle

94. “I remember reading once that when a seagull dies it falls out of the sky on the spot. You could be just sitting on the beach, enjoying an orange ice pop, and wham, seagull to the head.”

— Rebecca Serle

95. “Naples is a strange city,” he says. “It’s in tatters in some places, absolutely run-down, but there’s also this persevering Mediterranean beauty, almost Grecian. It was the most bombed Italian city in World War Two and has a largely tragic history – a huge cholera epidemic, poverty, crime – but there’s this strength to this place and its people. I find that beauty next to decay is its own kind of stunning. You can really feel it when you’re there.”

— Rebecca Serle

96. “It happens quickly and then slowly. We plummet fast, and then we exist at the bottom of the ocean for 8 days, an impossible amount of time to breathe only water.”

— Rebecca Serle

97. “And in that gaze I see it all – birthdays and dinners and shopping trips. Mornings spent watching soap operas in her bed. Nights on the phone. Care packages mailed to New York City. Scraped elbows and fevers and her voice, always her voice. Everything is going to be all right. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

— Rebecca Serle

98. “And finally to you, this time around: one of life’s most important challenges is determining what to hold on to and what to let go of. Do not be fooled into believing that you do not know which is which. Follow the feeling, follow it all the way home.”

— Rebecca Serle

99. “I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence.”

— Rebecca Serle

100. “She knew me completely, but it didn’t work both ways; it couldn’t. Look how much life was lived before I ever even arrived. Look at who she was before she met me.”

— Rebecca Serle