Top 500 Taylor Jenkins Reid Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “There’s only so long you can live your life while it’s being dictated to you by somebody else, you understand? And I don’t care how much money is in it for me, I’m not somebody’s lackey. I’m not some indentured servant. I’m a person.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

353. “I just want to know you’re okay. I want to know that you didn’t suffer. I want to believe that you are in a better place, that you are happy and have all the things in life that you loved, with you. I want to believe that you and your father are together. Maybe at a barbecue in heaven, eating hot dogs. I know that’s not the case. I know that you are gone. But I don’t know how to live with that knowledge.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

354. “So do yourself a favor and learn to grab life by the balls, dear – Evelyn Hugo.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

355. “To love someone. To care for them. To throw your lot in with theirs and think, Whatever happens, it’s you and me.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

356. “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

357. “Our family histories are simply stories. They are myths we create about the people who came before us, in order to make sense of ourselves.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

358. “You think too much,” he says. “That’s your problem. You’re trying too hard to find the perfect answer when an answer will do.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

359. “Por eso es peligroso amar a la persona equivocada, amar a quien no lo merece. Tienes que estar con alguien que se merezca tu fe y tienes que ser merecedor de la fe de alguien. Eso es algo sagrado.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

360. “They each seemed like they thought the other one was the only person in the room. Like we were watching two people who didn’t realize thousands of people were watching them.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

361. “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

362. “I’m just going to do my best and live under the assumption that if there are things in this life that we are supposed to do, if there are people in this world we are supposed to love, we’ll find them. In time. The future is so incredibly unpredictable that trying to plan for it is like studying for a test you’ll never take. I’m OK in this moment.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

363. “I hope one day you find someone who feels like the other half of you.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

364. “She’s going to be the girl bleeding in a beautiful dress until it kills her. I felt lost, sad, depressed, sick. I felt really hopeless but also like I didn’t have the luxury of giving up.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

365. “You can’t capture love in a bottle. You can’t hold on to it with both hands and force it to stay with you.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “I suppose everybody hurts everybody, but women always seem to get back up, you ever notice that? Women are always still standing.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

370. “People don’t find it very sympathetic or endearing, a woman who puts herself first. Nor do people respect a man who can’t keep his wife in line.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

371. “It’s on the house,” he said, which I thought was the dumbest thing, because if there is anyone that should be getting free food, it isn’t rich people.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

372. “But if you have to go, then go. Go if it hurts. Go if it’s time. Just go knowing you were loved, that I will never forget you, that you will live in everything Connor and I do. Go knowing I love you purely, Harry, that you were an amazing father. Go knowing I told you all my secrets. Because you were my best friend.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

373. “I would sometimes choose to just go along with what he wanted or what he said so that I didn’t cause a fight. And somewhere along the way, I started to feel like I couldn’t be honest.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

374. “Cuando uno quiere abarcar demasiado desde el comienzo, resulta obvio que no sabe lo que hace.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

375. “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

376. “I wanted to give her a lot of things. I wanted what I had be hers. I wondered if this was what it felt like to love someone.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

377. “Brick was a former matinee idol who honest-to-God thought he might be the messiah. Just standing next to him, I thought I might drown in the self-adoration cascading off him.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

378. “For all her posturing, Celia had one thing in common with almost every straight man in America: she wanted nothing more than to get her hands on my chest.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

379. “Just because it is in Malibu’s nature to burn, so was it in one particular person’s nature to set fire and walk away.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

380. “I’m glad you have no one left. I’m glad there’s no one alive to love you.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

381. “Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

382. “My older self knows that you must stop – in the middle of the chaos – to take in the world around you. To breathe in deeply, smell the sunscreen and the rubber of the ball, let the breeze blow across your neck, feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. In this respect, I love the way the world has aged me.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

383. “I’m OK with the fact that sometimes doing the right thing gets ugly. And also, I have compassion for myself. I trust myself.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

384. “When you find that rare person who really knows who you are, and they still don’t love you.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

385. “All right,” I say. “Show me the real you, then. And I’ll make sure the world understands.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

386. “I can’t live with my heart half-broken all the time.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

387. “The story of June and Mick Riva seemed like a tragedy to their oldest child, Nina. It felt like a comedy of errors to their first son, Jay. It was an origin story for their second son, Hud. And a mystery to the baby of the family, Kit. To Mick himself it was just a chapter of his memoir. But to June, it was, always and forever, a romance.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

388. “We just really liked each other. It was almost as if when I met him, I met this other side of myself. Someone who understands me and made me feel safe. It wasn’t just passionate really. We just knew we could be happy together.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

389. “I love you as much as I’m willing to love anybody.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

390. “You do sometimes sit and wonder why it wasn’t you, what makes you so special that you get to be safe. The world doesn’t make much sense.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

391. “Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

392. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

394. “But that’s a luxury. You can do that when you’re rich and famous. You can decide that wealth and renown are worthless when you have them. Back then, I still thought I had all the time I needed to do everything I wanted. That if I just played my cards right, I could have it all.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

395. “Because our whole is greater than the sum of our parts.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

396. “I don’t regret it. Because I know I had my reasons, and I did the best I could with every thought and feeling that led up to it.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

397. “There are people who see a beautiful flower and rush over to pick it. They want to hold it in their hands, they want to own it. They want the flower’s beauty to be theirs, to be within their possession, their control.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

398. “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

399. “Nobody deserves anything,” Evelyn says. “It’s simply a matter of who’s willing to go and take it for themselves. And you, Monique, are a person who has proven to be willing to go out there and take what you want. So be honest about that. No one is just a victim or a victor. Everyone is somewhere in between. People who go around casting themselves as one or the other are not only kidding themselves, but they’re also painfully unoriginal.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

400. “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