Top 100 Regina Brett Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an ‘Owner’s Manual’ to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable.”

— Regina Brett

52. “We all have a personal pool of quicksand inside us where we begin to sink and need friends and family to find us and remind us of all the good that has been and will be.”

— Regina Brett

53. “If you think you’re too small to make a difference, you’ve never been in a tent with a mosquito.”

— Regina Brett

54. “Bakers get excited over aprons. I love the soft cotton ones with pockets like my gramma and mom wore. They always kept a hankie tucked in one pocket, which wasn’t sanitary, but was comforting to the child who needed a tear or nose wiped.”

— Regina Brett

55. “Family is more than DNA, more than who we used to be, more than we can imagine we will become.”

— Regina Brett

56. “When you finally let go of the person you used to be, you get to discover the person you are now and the person you want to become.”

— Regina Brett

57. “Get busy living the life of your dreams instead of looking for the man or woman of your dreams.”

— Regina Brett

58. “Eating something fresh out of the oven is like a hug you can taste.”

— Regina Brett

59. “If baking is any labor at all, it’s a labor of love. A love that gets passed from generation to generation.”

— Regina Brett

60. “It takes tough love to order kids to step away from the iPhone or iPad during dinner or to take the devices away if they’re interrupting and interfering with everyone else’s pleasure at a movie, concert or other public event.”

— Regina Brett

61. “My daughter had carried within her a story that kept hurting her: Her dad abandoned her. She started telling herself a new story. Her dad had done the best he could. He wasn’t capable of giving more. It had nothing to do with her. She could no longer take it personally.”

— Regina Brett

62. “I say we all take the pledge and stay home. Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks for what you have, not to save a few dollars to get more.”

— Regina Brett

63. “When you have cancer, it’s like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn’t want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second.”

— Regina Brett

64. “Some people hate funerals. I find them comforting. They hit the pause button on life and remind us that it has an end. Every eulogy reminds me to deepen my dash, that place on the tombstone between our birth and our death.”

— Regina Brett

65. “Each day is a precious gift to be savored and used, not left unopened and hoarded for a future that may never come.”

— Regina Brett

66. “Cancer is messy and scary. You throw everything at it, but don’t forget to throw love at it. It turns out that might be the best weapon of all.”

— Regina Brett

67. “Like every wounded woman, I wanted someone who would never hurt me, never let me down, never reject or abandon me. It was an impossible order.”

— Regina Brett

68. “I once heard someone say that prayer is more than words. It’s a stance you take, a position you claim. You throw your body against the door to keep the demons from advancing and stay put until they go away.”

— Regina Brett

69. “Baking happens with ingredients that last for months and come to life inside a warm oven. Baking is slow and leisurely.”

— Regina Brett

70. “While journalists cannot right every wrong, champion every cause or fix every problem, they can – through the written word – lift someone’s burden for a day, make some elderly woman on a bus smile or let them know they are noticed by someone.”

— Regina Brett

71. “The last watch I wore felt like a handcuff. When I need to know the time, I check my cell phone.”

— Regina Brett

72. “The secret to success, to parenting, to life, is to not count up the cost. Don’t focus on all the steps it will take. Don’t stare into the abyss at the giant leap it will take. That view will keep you from taking the next small step.”

— Regina Brett

73. “It’s sad that grandkids show up at the end of obituaries, way behind the list of work place achievements, social clubs and survivors. Why last? If you’ve got grandkids, you know they’re first when it comes to the joy in your life.”

— Regina Brett

74. “When you hear the word ‘cancer,’ it’s as if someone took the game of Life and tossed it in the air. All the pieces go flying. The pieces land on a new board. Everything has shifted. You don’t know where to start.”

— Regina Brett

75. “It takes courage to sit on a jury. How many of us want to decide the fate of another person’s life or freedom? How many of us want to hold that kind of power in our hands?”

— Regina Brett

76. “There’s so much living to be squeeze into the cracks of one little day. You can make someone laugh, smile, hope, sing, think.”

— Regina Brett

77. “There are few places you can find silence. Air travel could be the last fortress of solitude.”

— Regina Brett

78. “The world isn’t ending. You are just experiencing turbulence. The plane is safe. The pilot is good. You’re in the right seat of life. You just hit a patch of bumpy air. Wait. It will pass.”

— Regina Brett

79. “Choas will come, calm will follow, and then it will start up all over again. The secret is to savor the ride.”

— Regina Brett

80. “Back when I was dating, the dreaded C word was Commitment. As soon as most men found out I had a child, they ran. If I ever got close enough to say the words, ‘I love you,’ they ran faster.”

— Regina Brett

81. “As much as the Pulitzer is the hallmark of journalism, I think what I love the most is when somebody says they took my column and it’s in their wallet. I have had people open their wallet and show me a corner of a column.”

— Regina Brett

82. “Pope Francis is not only changing the face of the Catholic Church, he’s challenging us to be the face of God in the world by seeing the face of God in the person we least expect to see it, including the person in the mirror.”

— Regina Brett

83. “Even if you have nothing in your wallet, nothing can keep you from having a great summer. You can listen to crickets sing you to sleep, trace the Big Dipper, breathe in the stars, run through a sprinkler, host a cartwheel contest in the front yard.”

— Regina Brett

84. “Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read ‘Peter Rabbit,’ I skip the part about Peter’s father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor’s pies. I also hid the book of ‘Grimm Fairy Tales.’ They’re just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.”

— Regina Brett

85. “When you write a book, you are asking someone to make an investment in their time and money. A column can come and go as the weeks pass, but a book needs to be timeless.”

— Regina Brett

86. “For me, being Catholic was who I was and who I am, just like I’m Irish and Slovak. It’s just so ingrained in us.”

— Regina Brett

87. “The idea of being stuck in a plane with dozens of people chatting over each other on their phones might feel like Dante’s 10th circle of hell.”

— Regina Brett

88. “We are all afraid of making the mistake that will ruin our lives. There’s probably no such thing. Even if we made every mistake we feared would ruin us, our lives wouldn’t be ruined. They would be changed.”

— Regina Brett

89. “This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice in it and be glad.”

— Regina Brett

90. “Choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”

— Regina Brett

91. “When I was 41, I found a lump the size of a grape in my right breast. I ended up bald, sick and exhausted from surgeries, chemo and radiation treatments. Ah, but I got to live.”

— Regina Brett

92. “Look, at the end of it all, God us going to ask just one question: Did you love? Eh? That’s all that matters. Did you love.”

— Regina Brett

93. “He’d be the first to say God never gives us more than we were designed to carry. Some of us were designed for more, some for less. No matter what, even if we are asked to carry a portion of sky, it is beyond bearable. It is a gift.”

— Regina Brett

94. “If you want to accomplish the impossible, get busy on the possible.”

— Regina Brett

95. “It takes a strong person to cry. It takes a stronger person to let others see those tears.”

— Regina Brett

96. “In real life, the dots aren’t numbered.”

— Regina Brett

97. “We need to stop hiding our tears and actually share them. It takes a strong person to cry. It takes a stronger person to let others see those tears. We need to be tough enough to be tender, no matter who is watching.”

— Regina Brett

98. “In time, I found out that in God’s economy nothing is ever wasted. All those “dead-end jobs” prepared me for the job of my dreams in journalism.”

— Regina Brett

99. “The only gift my dad ever bought me is still in my jewelry box. It died at 10 minutes to 11 decades ago, but the gold Caravelle watch keeps my dad alive. A watch isn’t about keeping time. It’s about stopping it.”

— Regina Brett

100. “But miracles aren’t what other people do. They’re what each of us does. They’re what happens when ordinary people take extraordinary action.”

— Regina Brett