Top 50 Simone St. James Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “She had been fair at drawing before the war. She’d drawn her mother dozens of times, as she sat reading or sewing. There had been so many things in those days that kept a person still, that required perfect concentration for hours on end. It had been easy to draw portraits.”

— Simone St. James

2. “Only a woman can truly understand the feeling of her very favorite item of clothing.”

— Simone St. James

3. “For the odd girls, the nerdy girls, and the murderinos. This one is yours.”

— Simone St. James

4. “The person who could be truly alone, in the company of no one but oneself and one’s own thoughts – that person was stronger than anyone else. More ready. More prepared.”

— Simone St. James

5. “I was doomed to it. For there was no way to convince him that, with all his scars, the terrible truth was that he was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”

— Simone St. James

6. “She was twisted with a crazy anxiety, mixed with a crazy hope.”

— Simone St. James

7. “You suspected me of murder?” I said. “I suspect everyone of murder,” he replied.”

— Simone St. James

8. “For a shy girl unused to men, it is easier to hurl the moon from the sky than it is to turn away from a man who truly wishes to pursue her.”

— Simone St. James

9. “The anger had gone as quickly as it came, and now she felt shaky and a little ashamed.”

— Simone St. James

10. “There is no justice, Malcolm had told her once, but we stand for it anyway. Justice is the ideal, but justice is not the reality.”

— Simone St. James

11. “Sonia envied her, the way she could turn her brain off, think about absolutely nothing. It was a trick Sonia herself had never learned. That was what books did – they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn’t have your own.”

— Simone St. James

12. “I bet you could sleep in the right place,” I said. “Not just at the motel. You can’t spend the rest of your life here. I bet you could sleep if you were in a place that made you happy. Where you knew you’d wake up to something good.”

— Simone St. James

13. “I was struck again by the deep quiet of the countryside, the absence of any human sounds; my mind still expected the clamor of cars, voices, all the clatter of nonstop human movement. Here was only the hushed patter of the drizzle, the call of birds in faraway trees. The air was impossibly sweet, like wine. A crow called from somewhere, its voice dark and throaty.”

— Simone St. James

14. “He’d sold his half of their house out to his ex-wife, taken the money, and invested it in the magazine while he lived in the room over his elderly mother’s garage. Strangely, he was in a better mood than ever since he’d done it.”

— Simone St. James

15. “There are large moments in life; but sometimes it is the small moments – the casual moments – that change everything. The second’s absent wandering of attention before an accident. The choice to take one road, instead of another.”

— Simone St. James

16. “Books were her salvation. As a child, she’d had a shelf of childhood favorites that she loved enough to read over and over again. But after, during the hospital stay and the long voyage and the cold days in Idlewild’s dreary hallways, books became more than mere stories. They were her lifeline, the pages as essential to her as breathing.”

— Simone St. James

17. “Once she started, she couldn’t stop, the edges of her memories sawing at her as she sat at her lessons, as she did her homework and ran pitifully around the hockey field and ate her tasteless meals in the dining hall. The memories weren’t the overwhelming ones she’d had that had made her sick. These were like a violin bow grinding along the edge of a single string, shrill, waiting for some kind of resolution to make it stop. The only thing that worked was writing.”

— Simone St. James

18. “It was infuriating how many people got things wrong about you when you were a teenage girl, but as she had learned to do, Katie took her anger and made it into something else.”

— Simone St. James

19. “That was what the books did – they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn’t have your own.”

— Simone St. James

20. “This was Roberta’s favorite time. The quiet, the chill of the leftover night air, the cold seeping into her legs and her feet, waking her up. The trees around the edges of the pitch were black against the sky, and from one of them three ravens took flight, rising stark and lonely against the clouds.”

— Simone St. James

21. “I put my book down, finding a Post-it note to use as a bookmark, because folding the corner of a page – even in a thirty-year-old book – is sacrilege.”

— Simone St. James

22. “It was the girls who locked themselves away, who had never felt the loving touch of a man, who, when they loved, loved the fiercest.”

— Simone St. James

23. “As she hooked her legs over the backs of his thighs and smelled the scent of his skin and let all her thoughts spiral away as sensation took over.”

— Simone St. James

24. “Am I bitter or am I sweet? Ladies can be either.”

— Simone St. James

25. “The girls listened in silence, hypnotized, no longer caring about teachers or dorm monitors or Latin. A few sweet moments of peaceful quiet, the kind only the radio could give them, a few moments of nothing but sound from the world outside, where people were living and singing and playing songs. Normal people in a normal world.”

— Simone St. James

26. “Her entire life in Illinois had been about what doing what other people expected, never what she actually wanted.”

— Simone St. James

27. “Books, Sonia had decided, were what she would live with when she finally left this place. She would work in a library – any library, anywhere. She’d sweep the floors if she had to. But she’d work in a library, and she’d read the books every day for the rest of her life.”

— Simone St. James

28. “There are moments when everything shifts, when the world becomes eerily like the kaleidoscope toy given to children, where with the turn of a cheap plastic knob everything changes, becomes different. Fiona looked at the man in front of her and the calm of downtown Portsmouth disappeared; the colors changed; the air smelled different. Everything flew upward, scattered, and landed again.”

— Simone St. James

29. “Part of her fascination had come from its innocence, the clean milkiness of the girl in the drawing, who could walk her dog without thinking about doctors or teeth or sores or scabs or any of the other things she had buried in her brain, things that bobbed up the surface before vanishing into the darkness again.”

— Simone St. James

30. “A man fighting for his sanity had the energy only for the simple tasks of his daily life. Friendship was a luxury.”

— Simone St. James

31. “But I’ve always believed that murder is the healthiest obsession of all.”

— Simone St. James

32. “Misery came off him like a smell.”

— Simone St. James

33. “There are moments when everything shifts, when the world becomes eerily like the kaleidoscope toy given to children, where with the turn of a cheap plastic knob everything changes, becomes different.”

— Simone St. James

34. “The people are where you find things. Like those records you just found. The people are the ones who keep the memories and the records the powers that be would rather erase.”

— Simone St. James

35. “Shh,” he said, his voice lowered. “Please don’t say it. I think she listens.”

— Simone St. James

36. “I think it’s instructive to be awake in the middle of the night every once in a while. To really see what you’re missing while you’re usually sleeping.”

— Simone St. James

37. “Thank God for old spinsters,” he said.”

— Simone St. James

38. “The man in the photo on the wall in the other room, the man on the ground in Vietnam in 1969, had been complicated and demanding and often absent, but he had been so painfully, vibrantly alive it had almost hurt to be around him.”

— Simone St. James

39. “There was too much history in this old house, too much pain, too much love.”

— Simone St. James

40. “Dark things are real things.”

— Simone St. James

41. “How it didn’t matter how afraid or how careful you were – it could always be you.”

— Simone St. James

42. “Please don’t say it. I think she listens.”

— Simone St. James

43. “It had been sort of a strange episode, but she didn’t regret it. That trip to Old Barrons Road had shaken something loose. Idlewild had always loomed silently in the back of her mind, a dark part of her mental landscape. She’d done her best not to talk about it for twenty years, but talking about it out loud now was like bloodletting, painful and somehow necessary at the same time.”

— Simone St. James

44. “It was crazy. It was the kind of story you told years later while your listeners rolled their eyes, because they had no idea how the terror felt on the back of your neck.”

— Simone St. James

45. “This was a detail that was rubbing her raw, keeping her wound bleeding, long after everyone else had tied their bandages and hobbled away. She should grab a crutch – alcohol or drugs were the convenient ones – and start hobbling with the rest of them.”

— Simone St. James

46. “But a novel always ends, the lies come to the surface, and the deaths are explained. Maybe one of the bad characters gets away with something – that’s fashionable right now – but you are still left with a sense that things are balanced, that dark things come to light, and that the bad person will, at least, most likely be miserable.”

— Simone St. James

47. “Inside were textbooks, old and yellowed. The top was titled Latin Grammar for Girls. Jamie read the title over her shoulder. “The good old days,” he commented, “when apparently Latin was different if you were a girl.”

— Simone St. James

48. “Aftershave, Beth thought, was one of the most important scents in any girl’s world. It was the smell of fathers, or uncles, or teachers, or priests, or husbands. Beth’s own father had worn aftershave, but the smell would be different on Detective Black, because sometimes aftershave was the smell of a man who wasn’t, and would never be, yours.”

— Simone St. James

49. “One of Katie’s first roommates, a stringy-haired girl from New Hampshire who claimed to be descended from a real Salem witch, had the habit of humming relentlessly as she read her Latin textbook, biting the side of her thumbnail with such diligence that Katie had thought it might be grounds for murder.”

— Simone St. James

50. “How it was always girls who ended up stripped and dead like roadkill. How it didn’t matter how afraid or how careful you were – it could always be you.”

— Simone St. James