Top 100 Riley Sager Quotes (2026 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. “Meeting people is easy. Keeping them around is the hard part.”

— Riley Sager

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Riley Sager

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

25. “But that’s not what you’re most curious about, is it? You want to know if I’m as evil as everyone says I am. The answer is no. And yes.”

— Riley Sager

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

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

— Riley Sager

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

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

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “Boys can break your heart and betray you, but not in the same stinging way girls can.”

— Riley Sager

40. “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

41. “Because here’s the thing about being poor – most people don’t understand it unless they’ve been there themselves. They don’t know what a fragile balancing act it is to stay afloat and that if, God forbid, you momentarily slip underwater, how hard it is to resurface.”

— 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. “That girl is gone now, replaced by someone wiser and harder but no less hopeful.”

— Riley Sager

44. “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

45. “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

46. “That can be said of certain places. The closer you get to them, the uglier they become.”

— Riley Sager

47. “By the front door is a table normally used for mail and car keys. On it sits a single sheet of paper bearing six typed lines. Holding my breath, I pick it up and begin to read. At sixty-nine, Virginia Hope Wrote her nurse this little note Thank you, dear, for saving me Now it’s time to let you be I take my leave, walking tall Knowing that I fooled them all.”

— Riley Sager

48. “A saying I’d heard long ago came to mind: When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.”

— Riley Sager

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

— Riley Sager

50. “Because that’s how I feel. Like I’m perched on the edge of a great chasm, waiting for the slightest breeze to shove me screaming into it.”

— Riley Sager