Top 100 Steven Rowley Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I used to be scared of anger, and that’s because I bottled it up inside. Not anymore! It’s like vomiting after drinking too much. Sure, it’s unpleasant in the moment, but then you feel so much better! Anger is beautiful if you express it just right. Let it out.”

— Steven Rowley

52. “We’re too often guilty of thinking that our parents arrived on this planet as fully functioning adults on the day that we were born. That they don’t have pasts of their own prior to our birth. That the father is not also a son, that the mother is not also a child. My mother had a tough beginning, enduring things I know little about. And yet I more often discount her pain and overvalue mine.”

— Steven Rowley

53. “Turns out it’s painful to be loved. Intolerable even, at times.”

— Steven Rowley

54. “Why do you like boys?” Grant asked sourly, but with slightly more boredom than judgment. “I don’t know, why do you like pizza?” “Because it tastes good in my mouth.” Patrick wasn’t about to go anywhere near that.”

— Steven Rowley

55. “To die would be an awfully big adventure. But it’s not true. Life is the real adventure. Having the hurricane inside you is the true adventure. And then I think not of Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth I, but of Mel Gibson as William Wallace. Everyone dies. Not everyone really lives.”

— Steven Rowley

56. “To live is the rarest of things. Most people merely exist.”

— Steven Rowley

57. “But he wasn’t living, he was hiding. From people. From friends. From family. From love. From work. From art. From contributing. From everything that mattered.”

— Steven Rowley

58. “How quickly she’d become part of the family by doing nothing else but resting her chin on his thigh while snoozing.”

— Steven Rowley

59. “And then on the very last night of my twenties, when I held my new puppy in my arms, I broke down in tears. Because I had fallen in love. Not somewhat in love. Not partly in love. Not in a limited amount. I fell fully in love with a creature I had known for all of nine hours. I.”

— Steven Rowley

60. “The connection between two people is not always something others are meant to see.”

— Steven Rowley

61. “Q: What sound or noise do you love? A: Puppies sighing.”

— Steven Rowley

62. “He smiled, happy that life could still surprise. Maybe there.”

— Steven Rowley

63. “I am a lot of things, many of them unflattering, but boring is not one.”

— Steven Rowley

64. “Everyone dies. Not everyone really lives.”

— Steven Rowley

65. “Hard truths can drive people apart. But great art can bring them back together.”

— Steven Rowley

66. “And one mimosa, light on the OJ.′ ‘Our orange juice is freshly squeezed.’ ‘Either way. A whisper of juice. I’m serious. You can really just wave an orange over the glass and that’s probably still too much juice.”

— Steven Rowley

67. “Jenny and I once talked about how we manage to live despite the knowledge that we are all going to die. What’s the point of it all? Why bother getting up in the morning when faced with such futility? Or is it the promise of death that inspires life? That we must grab what we can while there’s still time? Is it the not knowing if today is the day that keeps us going? But what if this is the day? What if the hour is here? How do you stand? How do you breathe? How do you go on?”

— Steven Rowley

68. “I do not offer one to Jenny.”

— Steven Rowley

69. “You look at me. Your mouth stops moving. But the entire time, you’re just waiting until it’s your turn to talk again.”

— Steven Rowley

70. “I have to be better about living in the not knowing.”

— Steven Rowley

71. “Bacon is pigs and pigs are our friends. Do you want to eat your friends?” Without hesitation. “If they taste like bacon.”

— Steven Rowley

72. “I can sit with her quietly, our bodies touching just enough to generate warmth, to share the vibrating energy of all living things, until our breathing slows and falls into the parallel rhythm it always does when we have our quietest sits. I.”

— Steven Rowley

73. “To think about life is to contemplate death – it’s what makes living so valuable. Our time here is limited, gone in the blink of an eye.”

— Steven Rowley

74. “Maybe it fixes itself. Or maybe it doesn’t. And we make peace with some things that are broken.”

— Steven Rowley

75. “Grant looked skeptically at his uncle. “What?” “You have a lot of muscles.” “Thank you. One day I’ll tell you about gay men and body dysmorphia, but not today.”

— Steven Rowley

76. “They banded together with a promise to throw one another living funerals so that none of them would ever be left to wonder what impact they’d had on the others. Their mission: leave nothing left unsaid.”

— Steven Rowley

77. “It’s all going to kill you. You might as well do something fun.”

— Steven Rowley

78. “I do not like a loose tooth, I do not like one in this booth. I do not like a tooth at brunch, I do not like foods that crunch.”

— Steven Rowley

79. “I can’t snap my fingers and order you to be anything. I can ASK you to choose happiness when you can. I can ask you to try. I can show you what happens when you let new people into your life.”

— Steven Rowley

80. “It’s natural, as our loved ones age, to start grieving their loss. Even before we lose them.”

— Steven Rowley

81. “You wouldn’t think a twelve-year-old dachshund would be good at Monopoly, but you’d be wrong there.”

— Steven Rowley

82. “You will never know what it is you want until you are certain of who you are.”

— Steven Rowley

83. “He carried a torch for air travel from the 1960s, before he was born, when flying seemed glamorous and stewardesses looked like Dusty Springfield or Petula Clark, served chateaubriand off of a cart, and came by every so often to light your cigarette.”

— Steven Rowley

84. “Trying to say how much your mom loved you is like trying to describe the size of the universe. It can’t be quantified. Can’t be done. I’ll bet she finds a million ways to say hello. Your eyes just have to be open to seeing them.”

— Steven Rowley

85. “That was the thing about grief; each memory had a way of amplifying in importance, lest they, too, be lost forever.”

— Steven Rowley

86. “It is the perfect moment, a perfect marriage of stillness and life, of beauty and harmony, of aloneness and togetherness.”

— Steven Rowley

87. “We decided instead of moping our way through a difficult summer, we needed a party. We needed you.”

— Steven Rowley

88. “How can you tell where you’re going when you’re always looking up at the past?”

— Steven Rowley

89. “He never wanted other people to see the sadness. He was so afraid people wouldn’t laugh if everyone knew how twisted he looked on the inside.”

— Steven Rowley

90. “It feels sometimes like Joe, whom I loved very much, is being erased. He’s just a smudge now on a chalkboard, smeared in an effort to get rid of him to make way for something new. And I hate that.”

— Steven Rowley

91. “Can grief and gratitude coexist? Could he miss the kids’ mother and also be grateful for his time with Maisie and Grant? Or did the gratitude just make him miss Sara more and wish she was the one on this train with him instead of her sleeping kids? And in helping them these past few years with their grief, had he once again neglected his own?”

— Steven Rowley

92. “Why people are so afraid, especially of other people who are different. Hate. I don’t understand why there’s so much hate in the world, but I guess that ties in with fear.”

— Steven Rowley

93. “Not everything had to be Paris to be a life experience. It was just that some things needed to be new, and carry with them the air of excitement that comes with the uncharted.”

— Steven Rowley

94. “And this makes me cry even harder. All those nights she had no idea that I went to bed angry at her. Or if she had known, she has forgotten. Because dogs live in the present. Because dogs don’t hold grudges. Because dogs let go of all of their anger daily, hourly, and never let it fester. They absolve and forgive with each passing minute. Every turn of a corner is the opportunity for a clean slate. Every bounce of a ball brings joy and the promise of a fresh chase. She.”

— Steven Rowley

95. “Los Angeles is a Neverland of Lost Boys who preen and crow far too often and demonstrate substance far too seldom. I.”

— Steven Rowley

96. “The purpose of art is to evoke, to awaken, to enliven, to anger, to romance, to shake the soul alive. An analytical mind putting reason, meaning, or even something unseemly like a price spoiled everything we love about, well, love itself. The mystery of it. The thrill. The reckless abandon of so completely surrendering ourselves to the object of our desire. The exhilaration. The shortness of breath. The physical response at an almost cellular level.”

— Steven Rowley

97. “Somewhere, sometime, I stopped really living. I stopped really trying. And I don’t understand why.”

— Steven Rowley

98. “When does it get easy?” He thought about lying, but what was the point? Greg didn’t send his children to Palm Springs to be lied to, and even if he had they deserved better. Instead, he squeezed her hand and said, “Any day now.”

— Steven Rowley

99. “Lily thinks about this. “All of my memories are my favorite memories.” I’m amazed by this. “Even the bad ones?” “Dogs don’t remember bad memories.” Envious, I scratch her on the velvet part of her chest. What an incredible way to live.”

— Steven Rowley

100. “And what stories these days don’t have happy endings? They all do, because the planet is on fire and our rights are being stripped and we’re slipping into fascism and people need some distraction from their miserable lives –.”

— Steven Rowley