Top 35 Stewart O'Nan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You couldn’t relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole – like the world, or the person you loved.”

— Stewart O'Nan

2. “The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?”

— Stewart O'Nan

Featured in: Romance Quotes

3. “All stories teach us something, and promise us something, whether they’re true or invented, legend or fact.”

— Stewart O'Nan

4. “Saul Bellow once said, ‘A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation’ – which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was – losing myself in these imaginary worlds.”

— Stewart O'Nan

5. “It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one’s own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper.”

— Stewart O'Nan

6. “Getting inside your character’s head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can’t be duplicated in any other medium.”

— Stewart O'Nan

7. “To be lost and forgotten-to be abandoned-is a shared and terrible fear, just as our fondest hope, as we grow older, is that we might leave some parts of us behind in the hearts of those we love and in that way live on.”

— Stewart O'Nan

8. “I don’t like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.”

— Stewart O'Nan

9. “A gift was what another person thought of you, and over the years he’d come to understand, by consensus, that his children saw him as someone who wore a tie to work, used power tools, played golf and drank scotch, which, while all true, seemed a superficial view of him. And yet when asked directly, he couldn’t say what he wanted. Nothing.”

— Stewart O'Nan

10. “Being agreeable didn’t make people less difficult.”

— Stewart O'Nan

11. “The happiest she’d ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?”

— Stewart O'Nan

12. “There was mystery at the heart of any of marriage, secrets even people close to it would never know.”

— Stewart O'Nan

13. “You’re proud of your ability to both believe and question everything. Secretly you think everyone does, but at some point they give in, surrender to the comfort of certainty. It’s too much trouble, this endless jousting of belief and doubt, too tiring. Finally you suppose it will break you, yet strangely it’s the only thing that keeps you going – though, true, at times you feel unbalanced, even somewhat mad.”

— Stewart O'Nan

14. “Late in life, after his mother had died, his father cried at baptisms and funerals and sappy movies on TV, age stripping away a final protective layer. Now Henry could feel the same softening taking place inside him, a helpless grief for the past and boundless pity for the world, and that was right too. No fool like an old fool.”

— Stewart O'Nan

15. “Like a funeral, a birthday wasn’t yours but for the people who loved you.”

— Stewart O'Nan

16. “The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.”

— Stewart O'Nan

17. “Damn straight I’m lucky, I thought. I’m a Red Sox fan.”

— Stewart O'Nan

18. “The single dinner plate, the silent house, the tumbler in the sink – this was how it would be if he lost her. His mother had gone quickly, from liver cancer, the mass discovered too late. He thought of his father alone in his condo, crossing off days on the calendar like a prisoner. He’d survived her by thirteen years, yet every time Henry saw him, he quoted her as if they’d just spoken. Henry could picture himself doing the same to the children. He already lived too much in his memory.”

— Stewart O'Nan

19. “There’s nothing to do. You’ve been in the business long enough to understand grief. That’s the awful thing: there is nothing to do but go on. You don’t want to, you don’t want to leave the loved one behind, but you do. Death’s taught you that much at least.”

— Stewart O'Nan

20. “The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions – everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.”

— Stewart O'Nan

21. “While a necessary lesson, it was always a disappointment to discover he wasn’t the fastest or smartest or best at everything.”

— Stewart O'Nan

22. “If all of this has taught you anything, it’s that hope is easier to get rid of than sorrow.”

— Stewart O'Nan

23. “And even you, then, will wonder how you have such hope, and marvel at how impossible it is to stop the heart from reaching out into the whole world.”

— Stewart O'Nan

24. “He could no longer be that Ed Larsen, but, through a lack of imagination or just sheer exhaustion, he couldn’t come up with a new one, and faked his way through the days like a bad actor...”

— Stewart O'Nan

25. “The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.”

— Stewart O'Nan

26. “Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He’d failed so completely that he’d become his own man again.”

— Stewart O'Nan

27. “Just contemplating the energy required to make small talk tired him.”

— Stewart O'Nan

28. “Getting sentimental,” you say, but who are you fooling, you’ve always been.”

— Stewart O'Nan

29. “These still mornings in the kitchen were a kind of penance meant to exorcise that fear. When he was working, it worked. It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it, which was the reason he worked in the first place. He was a writer – all he wanted from this world were the makings of another truer to his heart.”

— Stewart O'Nan

30. “Her anger was the fuel she used to keep going.”

— Stewart O'Nan

31. “While she was away, he’d forgotten how powerfully she broadcast her feelings, filling the house like a kind of nerve gas.”

— Stewart O'Nan

32. “Theirs was a private language, not shared with the rest of the world, and so exempt from censure, sheer burlesque.”

— Stewart O'Nan

33. “It’s as if the Sox have walked through the Stadium driving stakes through every single ghost’s, vampire’s and Yankee fan’s rotten, cobwebby heart.”

— Stewart O'Nan

34. “Lately it seems there are mysteries everywhere, as if you’ve only just opened your eyes.”

— Stewart O'Nan

35. “In Heaven you forget everything. In Hell they make you remember.”

— Stewart O'Nan

36. “It frightens you how practical you can be, how cold, even with your own.”

— Stewart O'Nan

37. “Success to him meant having the time to do nothing.”

— Stewart O'Nan

38. “Grief breaks down all but the crazy; it’s a secret of your profession, one people don’t want to know.”

— Stewart O'Nan