Top 500 Taylor Jenkins Reid Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “It’s so strange, how someone’s silence, someone’s insistence that something isn’t happening can be so suffocating. But it can be. And suffocating is exactly the word, too. You feel like you can’t breathe.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

202. “Music can dig, you know? It can take a shovel to your chest and just start digging until it hits something.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

203. “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

204. “Maybe you owe your parents nothing, maybe you owe them everything.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

205. “This beautiful thing you’ve been happy to simply appreciate, well, now it’s yours to own.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

206. “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

207. “I only remember clinging to her, holding her as best I could. I only remember saying, “We didn’t have enough time.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

208. “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

209. “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

210. “It didn’t seem right to me that his weakest self got to decide how my life was going to turn out, what my family was going to look like. I got to decide that. And what I wanted was a life – a family, a beautiful marriage, a home – with him. With the man I knew he truly was. And I was going to get it, hell or high water.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

211. “Silence is your best friend.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

212. “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

213. “From experience, I can tell you that if you go around trying to figure out what’s fair in life or whether you deserve something or not, that’s a rabbit hole that is hard to climb out of.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

215. “I had been living in this world where I thought I could have this closeness with Celia and this distance with Don and neither of them would need anything else from anyone else.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

216. “He told me he wanted to do work that invigorated him. He said, “You have to do that, too, Monique. When you’re older. You have to find a job that makes your heart feel big instead of one that makes it feel small. OK? You promise me that?” He put out his hand, and I shook it, like we were making a business deal. I was six. By the time I was eight, we’d lost him.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

217. “Brutal honesty. It’s OK to hurt me. It’s OK to hurt my feelings. It’s OK to embarrass me. As long as you do it from love. Nothing you could ever say out of love could hurt as much as it did to look into your eyes and see that you couldn’t stand me anymore.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

218. “You are happier to have known him than you are sad to have lost him.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

219. “We are lying in bed. We are naked. We are tangled in sheets, covered in sweat. We lie in each other’s arms and I am reminded of all of the other times we lay next to each other, catching our breath side by side, limbs intertwined.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

220. “It’s ineffable. If I could define it, I wouldn’t have any use for it.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

221. “Some men’s childhoods are permitted to last forever, but women are so often reminded that there is work to be done.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

222. “The finalists were Andrew Thomas and Jadran Petrovich, neither one of whom would set a record by winning. We live in a world where exceptional women have to sit around waiting for mediocre men.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

223. “Harry died an hour later. After he was gone, I had the devastating luxury of panic.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

224. “There’s the early marriage that ended in divorce when she was eighteen. Then the studio-setup courtship and tumultuous marriage to Hollywood royalty Don Adler. The rumors that she left him because he beat her. Her comeback in a French New Wave film. The quickie Vegas elopement with singer Mick Riva. Her glamorous marriage to the dapper Rex North, which ended in both of them having affairs.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

225. “I love you so much and I don’t understand why you don’t love me.” I said, “I love you as much as I’m willing to love anybody.” Which was true. I wasn’t really willing to be vulnerable with anybody at that point. I had felt too much vulnerability too young. I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

226. “It was inevitable wasn’t it? The small mistakes and heartbreaks of guiding a life. His mother had screwed up as much as she’d succeeded.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

227. “Hugo has weathered her share of Hollywood scandals, not the least of which being her seven marriages, including her decades-long relationship with film producer Harry Cameron. The two Hollywood insiders shared a daughter, Connor Cameron, who is no doubt the influence for the auction.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

229. “Me and you, true blue.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

230. “Because you are not yet who you will one day be.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

231. “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

232. “Oh I know the whole world prefers a woman who doesn’t know her power, but I’m sick of all that.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

233. “The sun rises the next day after mothers lose their babies, after men lose their wives, after countries lose wars. The sun will rise no matter what pain we encounter. No matter how much we believe the world to be over, the sun will rise. So you can’t go around assessing love by whether or not the sun rises. The sun doesn’t care about love. It just cares about rising.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

234. “You know the key to impulsivity is believing you are invincible. No one goes around throwing caution to the wind unless the wind is blowing their way.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

235. “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

236. “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

237. “I thought of how many women out there thought they could prevent their husbands from cheating if only they were as gorgeous as Evelyn Hugo. But it never stopped any man I loved.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

238. “You should be predictable and then do something unpredictable, and they’ll love you forever.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

239. “You are the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thought I have as I go to bed. I find it difficult to even kiss my husband now.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

240. “I have been reeling because I failed. Because I picked the wrong guy for me. Because I entered the wrong marriage. Because the truth is that at the age of thirty-five, I have yet to love someone enough to sacrifice for them. I’ve yet to open my heart enough to let someone in that much.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

241. “Why take a chance on another book when I already know I like this one?”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

242. “What I actually remember most about her is the emptiness she left behind. There was this sense, within the house, that there used to be someone else here. But now it was just my father and me.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

243. “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

244. “Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it’s a gut punch. That’s why it’s a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else’s. It’s sacred.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

245. “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

246. “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

247. “And she said, “A part of me wishes you wanted kids, because my kids make me so happy. But... I think in order to be happy like I’m happy, you need different things. And I want you to have whatever those things are.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

249. “Our parents live inside us, whether they stick around or not... They express themselves through us in the way we hold a pen or shrug our shoulders, in the way we raise our eyebrow. Our heritage lingers in our blood.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

250. “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