Top 500 Taylor Jenkins Reid Quotes (2026 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. “And I didn’t say I was confessing any sins. To say that what I have to tell is a sin is misleading and hurtful. 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

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. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “Intimacy is about truth.”

— 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. “Letting people love you and care for you is part of how you love and care for them.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

219. “It hurts to care about someone more than they care about them-selves. I can tell that story from both sides.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

220. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

222. “Would I have clung to his every word so tightly if his advice felt unlimited?”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

224. “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

225. “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

226. “But then I realize that staying still doesn’t actually pause time, it’s still passing, life is still happening. You have to keep moving.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

228. “Amar a alguien no es ser perfecto, pasar solo buenos ratos y hacer el amor. Amar es perdonar, ser paciente, tener fe y, cada tanto, llevarte una buena hostia. Por eso es peligroso amar a la persona equivocada, amar a quien no lo merece.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

229. “That’s the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn’t the end of you.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

230. “I was gorgeous, even at fourteen. Oh, I know the whole world prefers a woman who doesn’t know her power, but I’m sick of all that. I turned heads. Now, I take no pride in this. I didn’t make my own face. I didn’t give myself this body. But I’m also not going to sit here and say, ‘Aw, shucks. People really thought I was pretty?’ like some kind of prig.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

231. “But once he has his hand on the doorknob, I realize that I have put into motion the end of a lackluster life in the interest of eventually finding a great one. “I hope one day you find someone who feels like the other half of you, I guess,” David says.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

232. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

235. “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

236. “Don’t be so tied up trying to do the right thing when the smart thing is so painfully clear.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

238. “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

239. “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

240. “I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it’s not faith, right?”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “I blame pheromones, ultimately.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

249. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid