Top 70 Sarah Gailey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Because whatever this thing is, it’s beautiful. And whatever it is, it’s ours.”

— Sarah Gailey

2. “The thing about me is, I let things go. I let people go. I don’t know how to hang on to them – I try, but I hold too tight or not tight enough or something in between and they go. They always go.”

— Sarah Gailey

3. “Sometimes I don’t know what to say, and it never feels like it’s okay to not know.”

— Sarah Gailey

4. “I’ve always been good at letting silence put down roots.”

— Sarah Gailey

5. “Don’t worry, Houndstooth. This hippo caper will go off without a hitch.” Houndstooth.”

— Sarah Gailey

6. “Truth matters. Truth has always been the thing I’m after, the most important thing. But sometimes, to get to the truth, detours through fiction are necessary. That’s the job.”

— Sarah Gailey

7. “Getting caught in a lie is so much worse than saying nothing.”

— Sarah Gailey

8. “This time was going to be different. This time was going to be better. This time, I was going to be enough.”

— Sarah Gailey

9. “Being brave means holding your fear in one hand and your responsibility in the other.”

— Sarah Gailey

10. “But we have to at least make an effort. I think we have to try to do the right thing, before we can find excuses for having done the wrong thing.”

— Sarah Gailey

11. “I missed that handshake. I missed the grown-up feeling of having successfully completed a maneuver that existed solely to prove that both parties knew what they were doing.”

— Sarah Gailey

12. “Just because he needed killing doesn’t mean I can sleep easy.”

— Sarah Gailey

13. “She was faster than a secret spreading through a church picnic.”

— Sarah Gailey

14. “I think that’s what love is – it’s not about forgiving or forgetting right away. It’s about deciding to give someone a chance to earn your forgiveness, eventually.”

— Sarah Gailey

15. “My friends love me more than I deserve. That’s never been a question. The question is, how long will it take them to realize that?”

— Sarah Gailey

16. “Things get ruined sometimes. That’s just how it is.”

— Sarah Gailey

17. “Even after everything – even with everything that was still between us, that would probably always be between us – she was my sister. I was born reaching for her.”

— Sarah Gailey

18. “If I had been replaced with a reasonable facsimile of the person I’d been, would anyone notice?”

— Sarah Gailey

19. “All that’s gold does not glitter.” It seemed like the kind of thing that a kid would think was super-deep, would want to get tattooed on themselves.”

— Sarah Gailey

20. “I tried not to feel temporary. Just for a few seconds.”

— Sarah Gailey

21. “If you need to hurry... you’re already too late.”

— Sarah Gailey

22. “They shove wet noses against my palms and huff hot air against my wrists. They lean against my legs, trying to tell me about the grass and the cat and the one amazing smell they found and rolled in. I smile in the dark and tell them to go back to sleep, that I’ll hear all about it in the morning.”

— Sarah Gailey

23. “By accepting the isolation that came along with my secret, I could rest assured that no matter what, I would always be at least a little hidden. No one would ever know me, not fully, because no one would ever know what had happened. There was a piece of me now that no one would ever be able to reach.”

— Sarah Gailey

24. “I hear you in the night sometimes, you know. Pacing around, trying to get away from whatever it is that won’t let you rest.”

— Sarah Gailey

25. “He had cheekbones that sliced right through the thick, golden afternoon sunlight.”

— Sarah Gailey

26. “If you are loved, then you cannot be replaced.”

— Sarah Gailey

27. “Serendipity is just as cruel as it is kind.”

— Sarah Gailey

28. “When someone thinks they are getting away with something, they’re easier to manipulate. They stop looking closely at the things that might make it feel like their lie is unraveling, and they reveal things they didn’t mean to.”

— Sarah Gailey

29. “It’s not a caper,” Houndstooth replied, sounding irritated. “It’s an operation. All aboveboard.”

— Sarah Gailey

30. “I had gotten through the previous year of impossibly hellish obstacles. I had survived the discovery and the betrayal and the fallout. I could handle this banquet.”

— Sarah Gailey

31. “I know I won’t pretend to be any less powerful than I really am. Because now I know for sure: the worst part of me isn’t the strongest part of me. And the strongest part of me is so, so much stronger than I ever realized.”

— Sarah Gailey

32. “In my mind, I took what had just happened to my shoulder, and I put it into a box. A box with a tight lid. I dropped the box into a deep brick-lined oubliette. It landed somewhere next to my mother’s last words and my searing loneliness and everything else I needed to forget, and just like that, I was fine again.”

— Sarah Gailey

33. “A twenty-five-cent word sprang unbidden into my mind: “noctilucent.” The word described the glow of a cat’s eyes at night, but it also seemed right for the woman in the photograph. She was a moonbeam turned flesh, pale with white-blond hair and wide-set light green eyes. Beautiful was not an appropriate word; she looked otherworldly. She looked impossible.”

— Sarah Gailey

34. “She didn’t relish being called “sweetheart,” but something deep in her chimed at the word: this was a man who would let her go, if she was nice and pliant and didn’t cause trouble. This was a man who wanted her to be the kind of woman who liked to hear “sweetheart,” and that was a role she knew how to play.”

— Sarah Gailey

35. “The Librarians would make sure of it.”

— Sarah Gailey

36. “The things she wanted were never within reach. Her father’s knowledge and her mother’s love, friendship and romance and a decent job that would stick, the thing beneath her bed and the thing that clung to the underside of her brain like a spider. She could not summon any of it.”

— Sarah Gailey

37. “She was too alone to be afraid.”

— Sarah Gailey

38. “It didn’t occur to me to watch for cowardice the same way I watched for anger.”

— Sarah Gailey

39. “Don’t make promises,” Archie said with a sad smile. “Just keep them.”

— Sarah Gailey

40. “Affirmation and illusion, bound up tighter than two snakes in the same egg.”

— Sarah Gailey

41. “My mother had spent the duration of her marriage to my father whittling pieces of herself away, leaving void space for him to whiff through when he swung his fury at her. Once he was gone, she grew to fill those spaces again – to take up the amount of room she should always have been allotted.”

— Sarah Gailey

42. “Between Esther and the horizon, the wagons shimmered in the heat. She knew that they weren’t an oasis – no cool shade or sweet water was waiting for her there. But they weren’t a mirage, either, and that hope felt like just enough to fit in her fists.”

— Sarah Gailey

43. “He was relieved to have told me. He transmuted his guilt into my anger and now I was the one who had to carry it and he had the audacity to be relieved.”

— Sarah Gailey

44. “He was short, but he sprawled his legs out like a giraffe at a watering hole. I had an immediate fantasy of shoving him aside on the train so I could sit.”

— Sarah Gailey

45. “Never apologize just because you think someone is mad at you,” he said. “Never let anyone make you say that you’re sorry just to appease them.”

— Sarah Gailey

46. “He never says anything bad about his wife, though, which makes me trust him a little more.”

— Sarah Gailey

47. “He tried to build us strong and steady and whole. But he didn’t keep us safe. He didn’t know how to shelter us from all the hurt that was waiting, because he thought that hurt was the shape of love.”

— Sarah Gailey

48. “Rather than asking him to repeat himself, I waited. It was a trick I learned from my father, letting the silence thicken until it was suffocating.”

— Sarah Gailey

49. “Sometimes it feels like I’m in a staring contest with failure, and if I blink, I’ll die.”

— Sarah Gailey

50. “Tabitha stuck a finger into her cocktail, turning the drink an offensively bright shade of pink. “What’d you just do?” I asked around a mouthful of half-popped popcorn kernels. “I turned it pink,” she said. “Why?” She shrugged. “So it’ll be pink.”

— Sarah Gailey