Top 500 Taylor Jenkins Reid Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I made it fifty-fifty. Which is about the cruelest thing you can do to someone you love, give them just enough good to make them stick through a hell of a lot of bad. Of course, I realised all this when she left me. And I tried to fix it. But it was too late.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

202. “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

203. “Included in the sale will be the emerald-green Miranda La Conda.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

205. “My ambition has long felt oppressive. It is not a joy – it is a master that I must answer to, a smoke that descends into my life, making it hard to breathe. It is only my discipline, my willingness to push myself harder, that has been my way through.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

206. “Some people, you bathe them in those lights and they disappear. But some people, they glow.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

207. “How can you miss someone so much already? My mind is full of all the things I didn’t say. It doesn’t matter how much I did say. There was still so much left to say. I want to tell her that I love her. That I will always remember her. That I am happy for her. That I believe she will find Grandpa.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

208. “Twenty-five but she felt forty. Married but she was alone. Childless and yet, hadn’t she raised children?”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

209. “I don’t feel regret for the things I’ve done – at least, not the things you might expect – despite how hard they may have been or how repugnant they may seem in the cold light of day.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

210. “I switched to English, not wanting to speak Spanish anymore, not liking how strange it sounded coming out of my own mouth. “I’m Cuban,” I said to her. “I’ve spoken Spanish my entire life.” That wasn’t true, though. I hadn’t spoken it in years.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

211. “It’s as if a gorgeous, delicate bird has just flown to me and sat directly on my shoulder, and if I don’t make the exact right move, it might fly away.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

212. “You made my life worth living. I promise you I am going to do something with it.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

213. “My husband believed I might die. And he didn’t so much as even call the concierge. A switch flipped in me. I knew, right there and then, I needed to get away from this person. He wasn’t gonna kill me but he would let me die.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

214. “I took a taste of it. Not even a sip, but a taste. It took everything I had not to gulp it down, not to throw it into the back of my throat. It tasted like comfort and freedom. That’s how it gets you – what it feels like is the opposite of what it is.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

215. “I once read that charisma is “charm that inspires devotion.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

216. “If there are all different types of soulmates... then you are one of mine.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

217. “I’d made him arroz con pollo that night, and I specifically didn’t take my apron off when I brought it up. I wanted him to see me as harmless and domestic. I thought I’d get further if I didn’t threaten him. It grated on my nerves to have to ask him how I could spend my own money. But I didn’t see another choice. “Sure,” he said. “I think it’s a smart thing to do. You’ll get better, and who knows, you might even star in a picture one day.” I would star. I wanted to punch his lights out.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

218. “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

219. “Here is what I can tell you. All that matters in this life is that you try. All that matters is that you open your heart, give everything you have, and keep trying.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

220. “One small thing my dad said to me on a cold day in Vancouver has essentially been the basis of my entire life’s trajectory. For a brief moment, I wonder if I would have listened to him if he hadn’t died. Would I have clung to his every word so tightly if his advice had felt unlimited?”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

221. “Life is long and full of an infinite number of decisions. I have to think that the small ones don’t matter, that I’ll end up where I need to end up no matter what I do.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

223. “I feel no pressure to stop crying. I feel no need to explain myself. You don’t have to make yourself okay for a good mother. A good mother makes herself okay for you.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

224. “The tears that come out of me feel as if they were decades in the making. It feels as if some old version of me is leaking out, letting go, saying good-bye in the effort of making room for a new me. One that is stronger and somehow both more cynical about people and also more optimistic about my place in the world.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

225. “Everything that made Daisy burn, made me burn. Everything I loved about the world, Daisy loved about the world. Everything I struggled with, Daisy struggled with. We were two halves. We were the same.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

226. “I can’t speak for all people who have been hit by someone they love, but what I can tell you is that forgiveness is different from absolution.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

228. “Family histories repeat, Nina thought. For a moment, she wondered if it was pointless to try to escape it. Maybe our parents’ lives are imprinted within us, maybe the only fate there is is the temptation of reliving their mistakes. Maybe, try as we might, we will never be able to outrun the blood that runs through our veins.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

229. “We don’t need any government documents or witnesses or religious approval. It doesn’t matter that I’m already legally married, because we both know that when I was marrying Robert, I was doing it to be with you. We don’t need anybody else’s rules. We just need each other.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

233. “He had flipped a switch in me. A switch that changed me from a woman who saw making love as a tool into a woman who knew that making love was a need. I needed him. I needed to be seen. I came alive under his gaze. Being married to Don had shown me another side of myself, a side I was just getting to know. A side I liked.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

234. “Either way, it’s not enough for me to say, “I love you.” The words feel so small compared to everything that’s in me. I have to show him. I have to make sure that it’s felt as much as heard.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

235. “No one is completely good or completely bad.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

236. “You start to understand that grief is chronic. That it’s more about remission and relapse than it is about a cure. What that means to you is that you can’t simply wait for it to be over. You have to move through it, like swimming in an undertow.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

237. “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

238. “When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is “You’re safe with me” – that’s intimacy.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

239. “You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

240. “If you are heartbroken right now, then I feel for you deeply,” Evelyn says. “That I have the utmost respect for. That’s the sort of thing that can split a person in two. But I wasn’t heartbroken when Don left me. I simply felt like my marriage had failed. And those are very different things.” When Evelyn says this, I stop my pen in place. I look up at her. And I wonder why I needed Evelyn to tell me that. I wonder why that sort of distinction has never crossed my mind before.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

241. “It cost so much, caring. I didn’t have any currency to spend on it.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

242. “It takes everything I have not to take it back, not to apologize profusely. 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.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

243. “Evelyn, you are not capable of giving it up. And you never will be. And it will be the tragedy of my life that I cannot love you enough to make you mine.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

244. “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

245. “One of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

246. “But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. I really believe that. Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

247. “I love you,” she said. “I love you, too,” I whispered into her ear. “I love you more than anything else in the entire world.” “It’s not wrong,” Celia said. “It shouldn’t be wrong, to love you. How can it be wrong?” “It’s not wrong, sweetheart. It’s not,” I said. “They’re wrong.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

248. “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

249. “Some marriages aren’t really that great. Some loves aren’t all-encompassing. Sometimes you separate because you weren’t that good together to begin with. Sometimes divorce isn’t an earth-shattering loss. Sometimes it’s just two people waking up out of a fog.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

250. “Marriage is about commitment. It’s about loyalty. It’s not about happiness. Happiness is secondary. And ultimately, marriage is about children.” She gives me a knowing look. “If you had a baby, no matter how unhappy you were together, you’d have stayed together. Children bind you. They connect you. That’s what marriage is about.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid