Top 35 Rufi Thorpe Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “What aided the mind made the body suffer. They could choose mental health or physical health, but they could not have both.”

— Rufi Thorpe

2. “You can hit. Not anybody in this world can really and truly stop you if hitting is how you want to be. But if you do, you’re risking all that love you could have. Because nobody, nobody, nobody is going to stand around all day for you to hit just hoping to give you love in return.”

— Rufi Thorpe

3. “What had happened was so big, and we were so used to considering our lives as trivial. We almost didn’t know how to approach it. The largeness of what had happened, of what we had done.”

— Rufi Thorpe

4. “I finally did sleep for a little while, only it was like the difference between Pringles and actual chips, like someone took sleep and then put it through a horrible industrial machine, made it into a paste, and re-formed it and baked it into a shape that was supposed to look like sleep but was not anything even close.”

— Rufi Thorpe

5. “But sometimes when you are in a moment, it’s so close to your face, reality, it’s pressed up so close to you, that you just flinch, you react, and then your fate is decided, and all you have done was what you couldn’t help doing, and yet your fate is decided. You’ve done something that can’t be taken back.”

— Rufi Thorpe

6. “She carried herself like a dishonored queen. Even the way she held her head at an angle as she considered the buildings around us seemed watched and pretentious, and I thought about my mother saying there was something toxic about being very beautiful. It must be terrible to be a woman.”

— Rufi Thorpe

7. “Is there a darker night of the soul than eighth grade?”

— Rufi Thorpe

8. “We needed to pretend violence was something we could control. That if you were good and did the right things, it wouldn’t happen to you.”

— Rufi Thorpe

9. “That was the thing that was turning out to be most difficult about being a person. The people I had the most sympathy for were almost never the ones everyone else felt sympathy for.”

— Rufi Thorpe

10. “She knew this was because real people were both good and bad, all mixed up together, only the screen made everyone into basic silhouettes. The resulting image could appear either way depending on which way you turned it, which details you showed.”

— Rufi Thorpe

11. “It didn’t matter how terrified I was. It didn’t matter that there was no solution to the problem we faced. We would simply have to face it anyway. we didn’t have to be brave or heroic, we merely had to persist. And I found that I could do that.”

— Rufi Thorpe

12. “She felt so far away from who she’d been and with no easy way to explain who she was now.”

— Rufi Thorpe

13. “You need to be someone worth falling in love with- you teach them how to love you by showing them who you are.”

— Rufi Thorpe

14. “It was the word unfit that scared her, a mother who didn’t fit. A mother who wasn’t the right kind of mother like all the other mothers. A mother without a ring, who was too young, who let men look at her body for money.”

— Rufi Thorpe

15. “I loved him impersonally, abstractly, like a character in a book who, by virtue of their very distance from you, their belonging to a different world that you may never yourself enter, enflames your longing all the more.”

— Rufi Thorpe

16. “When that grew boring, she scrolled Twitter, which was like being bathed in the dirty water of other people’s thoughts. On Instagram, she was in a deep, deep ad loop.”

— Rufi Thorpe

17. “I’m just saying,” Jinx said, seemingly more lucid now, “when you’re lost in the deep dark forest, the thing to do isn’t to get scared of the trees. You have to find your way out again.”

— Rufi Thorpe

18. “But when had my father ever not been stiff and in pain? From my earliest memory he smelled strongly of Icy Hot.”

— Rufi Thorpe

19. “And as the months passed, that video was the only proof I had that Vera was mentally ill. Otherwise, I sometimes felt the doctors were simply trying to medicate the Russianness out of her. Sometimes I wanted to reassure them: “No, no, a perverse interest in nothingness is actually perfectly normal.”

— Rufi Thorpe

20. “It was fun: making things up, pulling each detail out of the dark of my mind like a rabbit from a hat.”

— Rufi Thorpe

21. “In Lady and the Tramp there is this moment where Tramp finally gets a collar, and it’s a symbol of being loved. If you get taken to the pound, someone is gonna come get you. The dog catcher is different with a dog wearing a collar. A dog without a collar is just an animal. If the world doesn’t know you are loved, then you’re trash. I think that’s even true of people. Maybe. Sometimes. Or I fear it is. That being loved is the only way to be safe.”

— Rufi Thorpe

22. “Because it was the biggest thing, a thing so magnificent and huge and altering she wasn’t even sure how it could be truly communicated to someone who had never experienced it.”

— Rufi Thorpe

23. “What else were you supposed to do with pain but polish it until it became something pointy and pretty?”

— Rufi Thorpe

24. “Everyone had always known, could see that there was something about me that wasn’t worth investing in. The way they could so easily throw me away.”

— Rufi Thorpe

25. “I like getting to be the me now watching the past me. It’s almost a way of loving myself. Stroking the cheek of that girl with my understanding. Smoothing her hair in my mind’s eye.”

— Rufi Thorpe

26. “My mom said it’s different when it’s the woman who’s violent. It strikes people as abnormal. Like, it’s natural for a guy to just ‘lose his temper,’ but if a woman does the same thing, then it’s a sign of something deeper wrong, like psychologically or almost metaphysically.”

— Rufi Thorpe

27. “Compared with the way she felt for Bodhi, her feelings for any of her former romantic partners were flimsy, like the clothing for paper dolls that attaches with only those tiny folding tabs.”

— Rufi Thorpe

28. “But when they talked about the opportunities she would be missing, she’d thought they meant a four-year college. She hadn’t understood they meant that every single person she met, every new friend, every love interest, every employer, every landlord, would judge her for having made what they all claimed was the “right” choice.”

— Rufi Thorpe

29. “It was my otherness that so angered these boys, my unknowableness, my dangerous wrongness. They couldn’t understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrance couldn’t understand me and it made him want to save me.”

— Rufi Thorpe

30. “And I knew something bad had happened, that his feelings had shifted. Normally, there was a cord of attachment between us that I could tug and feel him there on the other end. I suddenly had the horrifying sensation that it had been snipped off, and now I had a cord that led nowhere, that was just dangling in space.”

— Rufi Thorpe

31. “If she had a respectable job being a secretary or something, she’d have an easier time finding childcare. But she was a night worker, which somehow denied her the right to affordable childcare. It made no sense! A night care would be even easier to run – all the babies would be sleeping!”

— Rufi Thorpe

32. “Fear can change you. It can change you on a physical level. It’s not just feelings, it’s chemical cascades.”

— Rufi Thorpe

33. “Because all around her she could feel the echoey space of no one caring about her or worrying about her or helping her. She might as well have been nursing this baby on an abandoned space station.”

— Rufi Thorpe

34. “People are all so lonely. Even when they do horrible things, it often comes down to that, if only you take the time to understand them. It seemed like that should mean the world could be better, that people could help each other, like Jesus said. And yet that’s not what happens. That hardly ever seems to happen at all.”

— Rufi Thorpe

35. “The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars.”

— Rufi Thorpe