Top 280 Sarah Addison Allen Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “People like us will never really understand, Evanelle said. We fell in love with the men we were supposed to be with right off the bat. But women with broken hearts, they change.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

202. “Watching them, she realized they made so much sense together. Every look, every touch, was a reassurance, almost electric, as if they were shocking each other with every contact.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

203. “A happily-ever-after is never the real ending to a story. It’s where the real story begins.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

204. “How could someone with a life this full feel this empty?”

— Sarah Addison Allen

205. “It was like the way you wanted sunshine on Saturdays, or pancakes for breakfast. They just made you feel good.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

206. “Nothing is really broke, so it’s not like I can fix it. I just have to keep trying to find what I’m looking for.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

207. “When you have to do something, you have to do it. Putting it off only makes it worse. Believe me, I know.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

208. “The Waverley sisters had married men as steadfast and normal as the women were mercurial and strange.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

209. “Books can be possessive, can’t they? You’re walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved there on its own, just to get your attention. Sometimes what’s inside will change your life, but sometimes you don’t even have to read it. Sometimes it’s a comfort just to have a book around. Many of these books haven’t even had their spines cracked. ‘Why do you buy books you don’t even read?’ our daughter asks us. That’s like asking someone who lives alone why they bought a cat. For company, of course.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

210. “Bay remembered the Waverley house full of pumpkin pie scents in the fall. There had been mountains of maple cakes with violets hidden inside, lakes of butternut soups with chrysanthemum petals floating on top.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

211. “The Waverley sisters hadn’t been close as children, but they were as thick as thieves now, the way adult siblings often are, the moment they realize that family is actually a choice.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

212. “Under her thick pancake makeup, her skin had been pockmarked, but he would stare at her adoringly from his cot at night and imagine her scars were constellations, a secret map to a far-off, happy place.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

213. “There was a mood of magic and frenzy to the room. Crystalline swirls of sugar and flour still lingered in the air like kite tails- the smell of hope, the kind of smell that brought people home. Tonight it was the comfort of browning butter and the excitement of lemon zest.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

214. “Even at seventy-four, with a limp from a hip replacement, Margaret could still enter a room and fill it like perfume.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

215. “You like to think you don’t care, but you do. There’s this little thing called give-and-take. Some people you can be yourself with, some people you have to be less weird with. And guess what? Those people are all over the place. You can’t avoid them. The world isn’t just yours. Everyone has to live in it.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

216. “She wished she had known back then. Known that happiness isn’t a point in time you leave behind. It’s what’s ahead of you. Every single day.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

217. “But Claire had long ago realized, even after those constant dreams of her mother leaving faded away, that when you are abandoned as a child, you are never able to forget that people are capable of leaving, even if they never do.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

218. “But that would leave Paxton to fend for herself, and the last thing any woman wanted in this kind of situation was to look around and see all the people who could help her doing nothing.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

219. “Her grandmother had a life, a life Claire hadn’t known about or even imagined. She had tried so hard to know everything about Grandma Waverley, to be everything she was. But Grandma Waverley must have sensed something in Sydney, a kindred soul, with Sydney’s brightness and popularity. She gave Claire the wisdom of her old age, but she gave Sydney the secrets of her youth.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

220. “There aren’t a finite number of things that can make you happy.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

221. “And broken hearts cast long, dark shadows.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

222. “She loved him with a force that could bring tears to her eyes, and the thought of losing him felt like standing on the edge of an endless black pit, about to fall in.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

223. “Daughters of the South were to their mothers what tributaries were to the main rivers they flowed into: their source of immovable strength.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

224. “Her mother would tell her she was beautiful and that everything was all right.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

225. “The cake sitting on the dining room buffet table was wide and three layers tall. There was a fondant topper shaped like a branch, and from that branch draped candy strings of Spanish moss, flowing down the side of the cake like a veil. Bey kept looking over it. Why did Lisette make it so large? They were going to be eating cake for weeks.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

226. “To this day she could make tap water boil just by kissing him.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

227. “Everything I make up is nothing compared to her reality.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

228. “There was an art to the male posterior. That’s all there was to it.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

229. “It was like she was MADE of cake, light and pretty and decorated on the outside-with her sweet laugh and pink streak to her hair-but it was anyone’s guess what was on the inside.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

230. “The two giant oaks in the front yard looked like flustered ladies caught mid-curtsy, their starched green leaf-dresses swaying in the wind.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

231. “Those stories were the sound track of my summer with you.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

232. “It felt as though they were the only people in the world, two young women about to bury the symbol of their helplessness, as if that’s all it would take to make them whole again.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

233. “He used to believe good things happened in this kind of weather.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

234. “The air around her was cool lately, as if she were creating a vacuum with her unhappiness.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

235. “Kate picked up the carafe and poured some coffee into a cup. She added sugar and cream until it was the color of caramel. Her mom used to take her coffee like this. ‘So sweet it could kiss you,’ she used to say.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

236. “A breeze flew through, picking up some leaves and swirling them around, the sound like fluttering pages in a quiet library.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

237. “Something was about to happen.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

238. “She thought too much about what other people thought. That’s why she became such a homebody.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

239. “The right men make all the difference in the world. But the wrong men do, too.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

240. “Warm, enticing scents were floating down, basil and oregano and tomato. It made Wes long for something, something he couldn’t place. A happy childhood, a home.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

241. “Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They’re the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them. – ROSCOE AVANGER, Sweet Mallow.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

242. “To think, after all this time, after all the searching and all the waiting, after all the regret and the time she’d spent away, she came back to find that happiness was right where she’s left it. On a football field in Mullaby, North Carolina. Waiting for her.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

243. “He shook his head. “Uh-uh. That’s not going to work anymore. You can be as hard and sarcastic as you want, but we both know you really have a soft spot for me. You just admitted it.” “If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

244. “We have history, you and I. You just don’t know it yet.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

245. “She was enchanting. He loved the notes she wrote in her pretty handwriting, the way she smelled, like oranges and dough, the savage blackness of her hair.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

246. “Selma, if you keep acting like you don’t care, pretty soon everyone is going to believe you.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

247. “Sometimes people who had been together for a long time got to imagining that things used to be better, even when they weren’t.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

248. “Jack thought anyone who read couldn’t be all that bad.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

249. “She’d fallen into the best part of her past.”

— Sarah Addison Allen

250. “The men in their lives loved them the way astronomers loved stars, loved the promise of what they were, knowing there was something about them they would never truly understand.”

— Sarah Addison Allen