Top 70 Sarah Gailey Quotes (2026 Update)

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

— Sarah Gailey

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

— Sarah Gailey

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

— Sarah Gailey

4. “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

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

— Sarah Gailey

6. “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

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

— Sarah Gailey

8. “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

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

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

— Sarah Gailey

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

— Sarah Gailey

13. “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

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

— Sarah Gailey

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

— Sarah Gailey

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

— 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. “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

19. “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

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

— Sarah Gailey

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

— Sarah Gailey

22. “She couldn’t rightly say that this wasn’t going according to plan, since there hadn’t been much of a plan in the first place, but it certainly wasn’t going the way she’d hoped it might.”

— Sarah Gailey

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “No one would look at the seams that held me together and guess that they were scars.”

— Sarah Gailey

27. “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

28. “She wrote pages and pages about how she could tell she was getting things wrong, and how she wanted to say the right things but didn’t know how to. She kept writing about how she hoped I knew she loved me, even when she messed up.” He smiles. “She wasn’t saying ‘I love you in spite of who you are.’ She was saying ‘I might screw this up a lot, but the biggest thing is that I love you. The most important thing in my heart is that I love you.’ Does that make sense?”

— Sarah Gailey

29. “Not the question Cye had asked – do you believe everything you read? – but the question they hadn’t asked: why do you believe everything you read?”

— Sarah Gailey

30. “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

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

— Sarah Gailey

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

— Sarah Gailey

33. “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

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

— Sarah Gailey

35. “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

36. “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

37. “It was one of the only truly useful things she ever taught me: Stress stimulates growth. Sometimes, in order to make something develop in the right direction, you have to hurt it.”

— Sarah Gailey

38. “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

39. “The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens in inches. In a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.”

— Sarah Gailey

40. “I became an alone-thing, more than I had ever been before.”

— Sarah Gailey

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

— Sarah Gailey

42. “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

43. “He won’t be scared to jump next time, though,” Roya says, kicking her feet. “That’s the key to doing stuff you’re scared of. You gotta run at it.”

— Sarah Gailey

44. “There were other holes scattered through the yard, shallow ones, and I realized that she must have been searching for the boundaries of her discovery – trying to see if her entire garden was planted on a necropolis.”

— Sarah Gailey

45. “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

46. “Get used to it, ma’am. We have a saying where I’m from – boys will make you cry, but girls? Girls will make you sweat.”

— Sarah Gailey

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

— Sarah Gailey

48. “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

49. “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

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

— Sarah Gailey