Top 500 Taylor Jenkins Reid Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

203. “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

204. “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

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. “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

207. “I was in school before I met another person who looked like me. Her name was Yael. Her father was Dominican, and her mother was from Israel. She liked to play soccer. I liked to play dress-up. We could rarely agree on anything. But I liked that when someone asked her if she was Jewish, she said, “I’m half Jewish.” No one else I knew was half something.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

208. “He’d convinced himself that his wanting me was my fault. And I believed him. Look what I do to these poor boys, I thought. And yet also, Here is my value, my power.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “Intimacy is about truth.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

216. “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

217. “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

218. “Divide the pain in two,” I tell her. “And give half of it to me.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

219. “Her dress is low-cut, revealing her still-ample cleavage, and it occurs to me that it is the very thing that made her that will be the thing to finally take her down.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

220. “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

221. “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

222. “I’d give it all up, you know. All of it. The money and the jobs and the fame. I’d give it all up just to be with you, just to be normal with you.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

223. “Two men sleeping together. Married to two women sleeping together. We were four beards.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

225. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

230. “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

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

— 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. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “Accepting that something is true isn’t the same as thinking it is just.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

237. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

246. “If I don’t win,” she said, her wet hair dripping onto the spaghetti straps of her slip, “will you still love me?” I thought she was joking until I looked directly into her eyes. “You could be a nobody living in a cardboard box, and I’d still love you.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

249. “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

250. “Some people just don’t threaten each other. And other people threaten everything about each other. Just the way it is.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid