Top 40 Robin Wasserman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn’t exist, all at the same time.”

— Robin Wasserman

2. “In dreams you can become everything you’re not. You can reverse the most fundamental truths of your life. You can taste death, the ultimate opposite.”

— Robin Wasserman

3. “I should probably start with the blood.”

— Robin Wasserman

4. “Since I was dead – or worse than dead, buried alive in a body that might as well be a coffin except it denied me the pleasure of suffocation – I figured I should be allowed to grieve.”

— Robin Wasserman

5. “Don’t go looking in dark places, because dark things live there.”

— Robin Wasserman

6. “You don’t even realize you’re living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.”

— Robin Wasserman

7. “But things don’t just fall apart. People break them.”

— Robin Wasserman

8. “Nor did I need anyone’s pity, but I would accept it with grace, because I have been well trained. Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the powere to accept anything and move on.”

— Robin Wasserman

9. “I used to be an obsessive outliner – figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.”

— Robin Wasserman

10. “When I was a kid I used to wonder if, just maybe, the world existed only for me. If rooms ceased to exist when I stepped into the hallway and people disappeared once they left me, the rest of their lives imagined solely for my entertainment.”

— Robin Wasserman

11. “In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.”

— Robin Wasserman

12. “Full Disclosure: I hate David with the passion of a thousand fiery suns all going to supernova at the same time.”

— Robin Wasserman

13. “Impossible not to see them, not to remember what it was like, when it was like that. To sit there, shivering, as the sun dips toward the horizon and the wind blows cold over the waves, as the sky blazes red and darkness gathers around the girls, neither of them knowing how little time they have left before the fire goes out. Remember how good it felt to burn.”

— Robin Wasserman

14. “For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.”

— Robin Wasserman

15. “See them in their golden hour, a flood of girls high on the ecstasy of the final bell, tumbling onto the city bus, all gawky limbs and Wonderbra cleavage, chewed nails picking at eruptive zits, lips nibbling and eyes scrunching in a doomed attempt not to cry. Girls with plaid skirts tugged unfathomably high above the knee, girls seizing the motion of the bus to throw themselves bodily into their objects of affection.”

— Robin Wasserman

16. “Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right.”

— Robin Wasserman

17. “As last days go, mine sucked. The last day I would have chosen – the last day I deserved – would have involved more chocolate.”

— Robin Wasserman

18. “I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal.”

— Robin Wasserman

19. “There are some moments you’d rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it’s mostly those moments in which it’s smarter-safer- to stay awake.”

— Robin Wasserman

20. “I try not to think too much about an audience when Im writing the first draft of a book – at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what Ive written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.”

— Robin Wasserman

21. “The Waking Dark is about what happens when something awakens a towns darkest impulses and unleashes them on the world.”

— Robin Wasserman

22. “It’s significantly more satisfying to kick a wall than it is to kick thin air. For the rebellious teen- or the teen who wants to feel like a rebel- a clearly defined law gives you something to define yourself against.”

— Robin Wasserman

23. “The only thing more dangerous than a willingness to ignore the Law is an ability to change it.”

— Robin Wasserman

24. “I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.”

— Robin Wasserman

25. “I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents’ expectations and evidence of their disappointments.”

— Robin Wasserman

26. “No matter how terrifying, they need to decide that the only rules that matter are the ones they write themselves.”

— Robin Wasserman

27. “Pick a pair of them, lost in each other, a matched set like a vision out of the past. Nobody special, two nobodies. Except that together, they’re radioactive; together, they glow.”

— Robin Wasserman

28. “Im not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or let the characters speak through me, whatever that might mean.”

— Robin Wasserman

29. “According to Lacey I had the lyrics all wrong. I sang like it sounded to me, because those words sounded right: I loved you I’m not going back I killed you I’m not going back.”

— Robin Wasserman

30. “She felt, at times, that what had seemed like an infinity of choice turned out to be a funnel, life narrowing itself one bad decision at a time, each mistake cutting the options by half, spiraling her ever downward until there was nowhere left to fall but into a small, dark hole that had no bottom. Choosing.”

— Robin Wasserman

31. “Teen fiction should be about teenagers – no matter how many arguments there are about what YA lit should be, this seems like the one thing we can all agree on.”

— Robin Wasserman

32. “Girls had to believe in anything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might.”

— Robin Wasserman

33. “That if I pretended hard enough nothing was waiting to claim me, nothing ever would.”

— Robin Wasserman

34. “Life is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it’s neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I’d only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.”

— Robin Wasserman

35. “There had to be consequences. Lacey was always right about that. Maybe freaks stayed freaks and losers stayed losers, maybe sad and weak was forever, but villains only stayed villains until someone stopped them.”

— Robin Wasserman

36. “Eli shouted my name, and then his arounds were around me, and I reached for Adriane who held fast to a blistering, burning creature that once had been Max and somehow still breathed and stood and howled. Though he was now nothing but flame, a golem of fire, that lived only because he’d forgotten how to die.”

— Robin Wasserman

37. “The love you needed was the kind best avoided.”

— Robin Wasserman

38. “Be the person you were so I can be the person you made me.”

— Robin Wasserman

39. “I knew we were better together than we were alone, and better still than everyone else, and that was enough.”

— Robin Wasserman

40. “You could love something and still understand it had ruined your life.”

— Robin Wasserman

41. “The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness.”

— Robin Wasserman

42. “And you know what? If there is a God, and it’s that same God who’s so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this all-powerful, all-knowing creature for some reason just can’t get by without my worship? Then let him give me some proof. Or at least get over himself if I decide to go out and get some.”

— Robin Wasserman

43. “The doctor’s voice was cold. “There’s nothing to put back. There’s no body to go back to. The body of Lia Kahn is dead. Be grateful you didn’t die with it.”

— Robin Wasserman

44. “The girl was troubled; the girl was trouble. As all girls were troubled, as all girls were trouble.”

— Robin Wasserman

45. “I think you grow up different, by the water. You grow up knowing there’s a way out.”

— Robin Wasserman