Top 100 Riley Sager Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Every so often, life offers you a reset button. When it does, you need to press it as hard as you can.”

— Riley Sager

2. “Sometimes the only way out is through.”

— Riley Sager

3. “That’s another thing most people don’t understand – how quick others are to judge. And make assumptions. And presume your financial predicament is the result of stupidity, laziness, years of bad choices.”

— Riley Sager

4. “Because here’s the thing about details – they can also be a distraction. Add too many and it obscures the brutal truth about a situation.”

— Riley Sager

5. “Every so often, life offers you a reset button. When it does, you need to press it as hard as you can. Jane said that to me once. Back in our reading-on-her-bed days, when I was too young to understand what she meant. Now I do.”

— Riley Sager

6. “After all, following someone on social media is just a more acceptable form of spying.”

— Riley Sager

7. “When the land and water and sky conspire to take your breath away.”

— Riley Sager

8. “A naked Barbie lies facedown in the carpet like a murder victim.”

— Riley Sager

9. “No matter how much you look, something just beneath the surface will always remain hidden. I should know. I’ve been watching.”

— Riley Sager

10. “Instead of friends, I have acquaintances.”

— Riley Sager

11. “Final Girl is film-geek speak for the last woman standing at the end of a horror movie.”

— Riley Sager

12. “What is marriage but a series of mutual deceptions?”

— Riley Sager

13. “At night, you can’t see your reflection on the water. Centuries ago, before people knew any better, it was a common belief that reflective surfaces could trap the souls of the dead.”

— Riley Sager

14. “Every house has a story. Ours is a ghost story. It’s also a lie. And now that yet another person has died within these walls, it’s finally time to tell the truth.”

— Riley Sager

15. “Every house has a story to tell.”

— Riley Sager

16. “I think he did it, but I just can’t prove it. – Taylor Swift, “No Body, No Crime.”

— Riley Sager

17. “I have plenty of friends who are boys, most of them gay or too socially awkward to consider a romantic relationship.”

— Riley Sager

18. “We grow up expecting our parents to live forever until, one day, they’re suddenly gone.”

— Riley Sager

19. “People don’t lie unless they’re hiding something.”

— Riley Sager

20. “Baking is a science, as rigorous as chemistry or physics. There are rules that must be followed. Too much of one thing and not enough of another can lead to ruin. I find comfort in this. Outside, the world is an unruly place where men prowl with sharpened knives. In baking, there is only order.”

— Riley Sager

21. “Never take anything you haven’t earned, my father used to say. You always end up paying for it one way or another.”

— Riley Sager

22. “I don’t know if this is my fault or theirs. Maybe I pushed them away without realizing it. Or maybe it’s just a natural by-product of my downward spiral. That loss inevitably begets loss.”

— Riley Sager

23. “Even a prison becomes comforting if it’s the only thing you know.”

— Riley Sager

24. “I make jokes,” I say, “because it’s easier to pretend I’m not feeling what I’m feeling than to actually feel it.”

— Riley Sager

25. “The lake is darker than a coffin with the lid shut,” she’d say. “And as deep as the ocean. If you sink under, you’ll never come back up again. You’ll be trapped forever.”

— Riley Sager

26. “I’m not an alcoholic. I can quit at any time. I just don’t want to.”

— Riley Sager

27. “Yesterday, Mrs. Baker told me Hope’s End was a place where young women are given the benefit of the doubt. That’s not true everywhere. It’s true hardly anywhere.”

— Riley Sager

28. “That’s not your choice. It’s already been decided for you. You can’t change what’s happened. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.”

— Riley Sager

29. “Grief is tricky like that. It can lie low for hours, long enough for magical thinking to take hold. Then, when you’re good and vulnerable, it will leap out at you like a fun-house skeleton, and all the pain you thought was gone comes roaring back.”

— Riley Sager

30. “Then it hits me. Hard. I’m like a nail struck by a hammer – brittle, quivering, sinking deeper into something from which there is no escape.”

— Riley Sager

31. “Everything is a game, Em. Whether you know it or not. Which means that sometimes a lie is more than just a lie. Sometimes it’s the only way to win.”

— Riley Sager

32. “With wealth comes power. Power earns you importance. And the truly important people in the world deserve to live longer than those beneath them. That’s especially true as we face another epidemic.”

— Riley Sager

33. “That’s the real reason I love the book so much. It’s the happy ending Jane deserved. Not the grim one she in all likelihood received.”

— Riley Sager

34. “Meeting people is easy. Keeping them around is the hard part.”

— Riley Sager

35. “There needs to be a counterpoint. Something dark. Or bitter. Or sour. Unsweetened chocolate. Cardamom and cinnamon. Lemon and lime. They cut through all the sugar, taming it just enough so that when you do taste the sweetness, you appreciate it all the more.”

— Riley Sager

36. “Omnes vulnerant; ultima necat. I remember the phrase from high school Latin class, although not because I excelled at the language. In fact, I was terrible at it. I remember only because it sent a chill through me when I first learned what it meant. All hours wound; the last one kills.”

— Riley Sager

37. “I make no attempts to disguise my scars. I just pretend they don’t exist.”

— Riley Sager

38. “I take a deep breath, trying to collect my thoughts. But they’re an unruly, unreliable bunch. My skull feels like a snow globe recently shaken, swirling with important bits of information that have yet to land. And I can’t grasp.”

— Riley Sager

39. “I was friendly but friendless. Approachable yet purposefully aloof. I saw no point in getting too close with anyone.”

— Riley Sager

40. “There are plenty of openings available, just not for me. The curse of being your basic office drone. I’m a dime a dozen, and everyone is looking for a quarter.”

— Riley Sager

41. “It’s a beautiful afternoon. Mid-sixties, sunny and clear. It reminds me of my childhood. Of pumpkins and piles of leaves and trick-or-treating.”

— Riley Sager

42. “Alcoholism is an occupational hazard of being an actor, of being a widow, and of being alone. And I’m all three.”

— Riley Sager

43. “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.”

— Riley Sager

44. “I once made out with an altar boy in the confessional during Christmas mass.”

— Riley Sager

45. “Sometimes you can’t simultaneously be smart, brave, and careful. Sometimes you need to choose one.”

— Riley Sager

46. “Although their eventual fate remains a mystery, I’m certain that what happened to those girls is all my fault.”

— Riley Sager

47. “I’m the moth that got careless with the flame. Now I’m engulfed.”

— Riley Sager

48. “I’m surprised, until I notice her wan and tired appearance.”

— Riley Sager

49. “There’s safety in numbers, yes, but also uncertainty.”

— Riley Sager

50. “I’m starting to think I don’t belong anywhere. That it’s my lot in life to occupy limbo al my own.”

— Riley Sager