Top 30 Tami Hoag Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “They don’t matter. I thought I had to prove something, and I did, to myself. There’s nothing left for me to prove. I can move on with my life.”

— Tami Hoag

2. “In a lifestyle where there are no boundaries, it becomes a challenge to find one’s true self. If everything comes easily, there is no way to establish worth. And if nothing has real value, then there is no way to gauge satisfaction or accomplishment or contentment.”

— Tami Hoag

3. “The world isn’t black and white, Annie, it’s shades of grey.”

— Tami Hoag

4. “But then I had long mistaken being spoiled for being strong, being defiant for being independent, being reckless for being brave.”

— Tami Hoag

5. “The past overshadows the present foreshadows the future.”

— Tami Hoag

6. “Family was a fertile breeding ground for the kind of psychological bacteria that warped minds and devoured hope.”

— Tami Hoag

7. “You don’t have to access the physical details to address the emotional damage within yourself. You can’t escape your own experience.”

— Tami Hoag

8. “They don’t have to be big goals. A small one each day. They’re like handholds and toeholds as you climb the bigger mountain. Ultimately, you will get to the top of the mountain, but in the moment you only need to focus on the next ledge.”

— Tami Hoag

9. “From the dawn of time to the end of time, the world would never run short of cold, cold hearts.”

— Tami Hoag

10. “Man enters into the ethical world through fear and not through love.” – Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil.”

— Tami Hoag

11. “We never know the quality of someone else’s life, though we seldom resist the temptation to assume and pass judgement.”

— Tami Hoag

12. “Most violence committed against women is perpetuated by men. I once read a quote that the thing a man fears most from a woman is that she’ll laugh at him, and the thing a woman most fears from a man is that he’ll kill her.”

— Tami Hoag

13. “The horse world is populated by two kinds of people: those who love horses, and those who exploit horses and the people who love them.”

— Tami Hoag

14. “I love everything about you. Don’t you ever think I don’t. Even when you make me mad, I love you so much I can hardly stand it.”

— Tami Hoag

15. “He was broken because of the army, and the army didn’t want him because he was broken.”

— Tami Hoag

16. “We all change. The causes are different; that’s all. Some people change because they want to, some because they have to. Sometimes it’s a choice and sometimes it’s not. You didn’t get to pick.”

— Tami Hoag

17. “I’m telling you, you did what you believed you had to do through all of this. Not what was easiest or best for you. You did what you did, and you’re owning it. And I don’t know ten men who would be brave enough to do that.”

— Tami Hoag

18. “Tattoos are a road map of the bearer’s personal journey.”

— Tami Hoag

19. “Her immediate, instinctive response was to distract herself with physical pain. She wanted to go to the kitchen and get a knife and cut herself to relieve the pressure and clear her mind.”

— Tami Hoag

20. “People who had never experienced suicidal thoughts didn’t understand the seductiveness, the insidiousness of those thoughts.”

— Tami Hoag

21. “The zombie is the angle. You want people to get to the rest of what you just said? Embrace the zombie. We live in a society of self-absorbed, unaware drones desensitized to the suffering of others.”

— Tami Hoag

22. “Being rich has never stopped anyone from being greedy.”

— Tami Hoag

23. “She felt stupid, though she knew she wasn’t. She was intelligent, had always been an A student and an overachiever. The fact that her short-term memory came and went didn’t make her less intelligent. It just made her feel that way – which made her think other people would feel the same way about her. They would think of her as brain-damaged.”

— Tami Hoag

24. “Minnesotans hate zeal. Zeal is right up there on the list of suspicious emotional behaviors like joy and despair. Always err on the side of blandness.”

— Tami Hoag

25. “Beneath all the unintelligent commentary about pop culture and what everyone had for dinner, the Twitterverse was a turbulent sea of vicious accusation, unsubstantiated rumor, and outright lies. The false facelessness of it gave people the freedom to strike out in ways they might never have dared in person. Even the meek became assassins on Twitter, drunk on the counterfeit confidence of imagined anonymity.”

— Tami Hoag

26. “She needed care and time; enough space not to feel threatened, but not so much that she could retreat.”

— Tami Hoag

27. “Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.”

— Tami Hoag

28. “She couldn’t concentrate enough to lose herself in a book – her lifelong method of escape.”

— Tami Hoag

29. “For me the most valuable part of this kind of research, however, is just hanging out with the men and women on the job, listening to them, absorbing the atmosphere and attitudes of their world.”

— Tami Hoag

30. “Parker suspected that Jace had been born an adult. At nineteen he had a larger sense of duty and responsibility than ninety percent of the people Parker knew.”

— Tami Hoag

31. “Every family has its secrets, and those secrets can run deep – deeper than lies, deeper than death. And they impact every member of that family in ways we can’t know.”

— Tami Hoag

32. “He had no interest in passing up experiences or putting opportunities off to a tomorrow that might never come.”

— Tami Hoag

33. “I know how to boil water, that doesn’t make me a gourmet chef.”

— Tami Hoag

34. “Forward had become a mantra months ago. Move forward physically, psychologically, spiritually, metaphorically. Movement seemed to pull taut the lines upon which facts and ideas aligned themselves in his mind. Movement maintained order.”

— Tami Hoag