Top 500 Taylor Jenkins Reid Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “My mother raised me to be polite, to be demure. I have long operated under the idea that civility is subservience. But it hasn’t gotten me very far, that type of kindness. The world respects people who think they should be running it. I’ve never understood that, but I’m done fighting it. I’m here to be Frankie one day, maybe bigger than Frankie. To do big, important work that I am proud of. To leave a mark. And I’m nowhere near doing that yet.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

202. “Thank you,” I say to my parents. “For trusting me with this store and for waiting for me to fall in love with it on my own, in my own way. Thank you for guiding me toward a life that makes me happy.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

203. “You have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here, Monique. You can see that, right?” “Of course.” “So do yourself a favor and learn how to grab life by the balls, dear. Don’t be so tied up trying to do the right thing when the smart thing is so painfully clear.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

204. “She liked to ignore the fact that I had made love to men and enjoyed it. She liked to ignore it until the very moment she decided to be threatened by it. That seemed to be her pattern. I was a lesbian when she loved me and a straight woman when she hated me.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

205. “First, you have to push people’s boundaries and not feel bad about it. No one is going to give you anything if you don’t ask for it. You tried. You were told no. Get over it.” “And the second thing?” “When you use people, be good at it.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

206. “There’s this peace that comes with knowing you have a person in the world who would do anything for you, that you would do anything for.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

207. “Destruction. And renewal, rising from the ashes. The story of fire.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

208. “The two of you think you’re lost souls, but you’re what everybody is looking for.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

209. “I know how it feels for people to assume things about you, to prescribe a label for you based on how you appear to them. I have spent my life trying to explain to people that while I look black, I am biracial. I have spent my life knowing the importance of allowing people to tell you who they are instead of reducing them to labels.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

210. “It just became so perfectly clear to me that I had been holding on tightly to the possibility. The possibility of Daisy. And suddenly, I was having a very hard time with the idea of letting that go. Of saying, “Never.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

211. “Fidel Castro had control of Cuba. Eisenhower had already put the economic embargo in place by that point. The Bay of Pigs had been a disaster. Being a Cuban-American was complicated. And instead of trying to make my way in the world as a Cuban woman, I simply forsook where I came from. In some ways, this helped me release any remaining ties connecting me to my father.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

212. “Intimacy is about truth.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

213. “I regret that marriage, but I do not regret that dress.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

214. “Your love life should bring you love. If it doesn’t, no matter how hard you try, if you are honest and fair and good, and you decide it’s over and you need to go find love somewhere else, then... what more can the world ask of you?”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

215. “Talent like Daisy’s is wasted on people like Daisy.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

216. “I’d rather survive it than never feel it.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

217. “I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there’s a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than others.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

218. “Be wary of men with something to prove.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

219. “I don’t think that true love means your only love. I think true love means loving truly. Loving purely. Loving wholly.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

220. “I’m bisexual. Don’t ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

221. “The devastating luxury of panic overtook me.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

222. “No one goes around throwing caution to the wind unless the wind is blowing their way.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

223. “Grief is like a deep, dark hole. It calls like a siren: Come to me, lose yourself here. And you fight it and you fight it and you fight it, but when you finally do succumb and jump down into it, you can’t quite believe how deep it is. It feels as if this is how you will live for the rest of your life, falling. Terrified and devastated, until you yourself die.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

224. “You gave me hope and perspective and confidence. Right before you gave me my baby.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

225. “Everyone I loved is dead now. There’s no one left to protect. No one left to lie for but me – Evelyn Hugo.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

226. “I’m cynical and I’m bossy, and most people would consider me vaguely immoral.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

227. “Nina didn’t hate Carrie Soto for stealing her husband because husbands can’t be stolen. Carrie Soto wasn’t a thief; Brandon Randall was a traitor.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

228. “Anyway, about the sandbar. It reminded me of you because you are my sandbar. I was lost at sea, and then you showed up. My dry land.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

229. “Celia may have left me in a huff, but it was a death by a thousand cuts. I hurt her with these tiny scratches, day after day. And then I got surprised when it left a wound too big to heal.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

230. “Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

231. “Don’t ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box. Don’t do that.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

232. “I once thought that grief was chronic, that all you could do was appreciate the good days and take them along with the bad. And then I started to think that maybe the good days aren’t just days; maybe the good days can be good weeks, good months, good years. Now I wonder if grief isn’t something like a shell. You wear it for a long time and then one day you realize you’ve outgrown it. So you put it down.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

233. “She likes to be cavalier about things that would change other people’s lives. Isn’t that the very definition of power? Watching people kill themselves over something that means nothing to you?”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

234. “You don’t spend years pining away for one voice not to notice it when it finally appears.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

235. “Reading your letter felt like gasping for air after being trapped under water. I hope you will forgive me for being so blunt, but how did we make such a mess of it all? And what does it mean that we have not spoken in a decade but I still hear your voice in my head every day?”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

236. “Hice que fuera mitad y mitad. Que es una de las peores cosas que puedes hacerle a alguien a quien quieres: darle apenas lo suficiente para que se quede contigo a pesar de tantos malos momentos.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

237. “I don’t want to let you love me if you don’t think you can lose me again. One last time.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

238. “I blame pheromones, ultimately.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

239. “They shine brighter than anything else in the sky and then fade out really quickly. A supernova is a short burst of extraordinary energy.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

240. “I decided I don’t need perfect love and I don’t need a perfect husband and I don’t need perfect kids and a perfect life and all that. I want mine. I want my love, my husband, my kids, my life.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

241. “What a gift it is, to be able to guide someone to a point and then let them finish it themself. To give someone all the knowledge you have and then pray they use it right.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

242. “I don’t need perfect love and I don’t need a perfect husband and I don’t need perfect kids and a perfect life and all that. I want mine. I want my love, my husband, my kids, my life. I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. I don’t expect anything to be perfect, but things don’t have to be perfect to be strong.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

243. “Stay with me, Harry. Stay with me. Stay true blue.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

244. “Im not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. I don’t expect anything to be perfect. But things don’t have to be perfect to be strong.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

245. “My dad and I. Always together. Our little team of two. Proud coach and star student.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

246. “My heart is truly broken. And I know that even if it mends, it will look different, feel different, beat differently.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

247. “Isn’t it awfully convenient,” Harry added, “that when men make the rules, the one thing that’s looked down on the most is the one thing that would bear them the greatest threat?”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

248. “I DON’T WANT TO DO this,” Celia said. She was wearing a tailored black dress with a deep-V neckline. It was the kind of dress I could never wear out of the house or I’d be picked up on a prostitution charge.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

249. “Don had pushed me down the stairs nine days before. Even as I say it all these years later, I feel the need to defend him. To say that it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. That we were toward the bottom of the stairs, and he gave me a shove that bumped me down about four steps and onto the floor.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

250. “All I could think was that he didn’t know about that line of freckles on her hip. I knew about them, and he didn’t.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid