Top 500 Taylor Jenkins Reid Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “They will not know what the future holds or if their paths will ever cross again. But they will feel that – for one night at least – someone has seen them as they have always wanted to be seen. And that will be enough.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

355. “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

356. “Sometimes divorce isn’t an earth-shattering loss. Sometimes it’s just two people waking up out of a fog.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

357. “You want that normal family life so bad. You wanted it so bad you met someone at nineteen and never looked back.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

358. “And yet, we cannot deny that the tide has turned. Carrie Soto is the past. Nicki Chan is the future. The Queen is dead, long live the Queen.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

359. “Oh, you definitely are. Getting me fired because you think I’ll show you up? Awful. That’s just awful, Evelyn. And walking around bragging about how you use people? Just terrible. But I really like it when you talk about.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

361. “When you almost lose your life, it makes you want to double down, to do something important and bigger than yourself.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

362. “It is hard to be so honest, so vulnerable, so exposed. But I find that it always leads you someplace freer.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

363. “As we spoke more, he told me about a physician-assisted suicide support group he and his sister had joined, for those at the end of their lives and their loved ones. So many in the group were fighting for the right to die with dignity. Healthy eating wasn’t going to save his sister’s life, and neither of them wanted her to suffer any longer than she had to. I knew then that I wanted, very deeply, to give a voice to the people of that support group.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

364. “That’s like saying Achilles was a great warrior simply because he lived during wartime. Achilles was a great warrior because it was his destiny to be one.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

365. “People act like marriage is confinement, June thought, but isn’t this freedom? She was thrilled to finally be able to say yes, to feel everything she wanted to feel.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

366. “I can’t think of any two things that make you quite as self-absorbed as addiction and heartbreak. I had a selfish heart. I didn’t care about anyone or anything but my own pain. My own need. My own aching. I’d have made anyone hurt if it could have taken some of mine away. It’s just how sick I was.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

367. “As I tell my mom I love her and hang up the phone, I feel proud of myself, smug even. I have no idea that in less than a week, Evelyn Hugo will finish her story, and I’ll find out what this has all been about, and I will hate her so much that I’ll be truly afraid I might kill her.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

368. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

370. “When you sit there and wish things had happened differently, you can’t just wish away the bad stuff. You have to think about all the good stuff you might lose, too.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

371. “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

372. “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

373. “I love him. I love this man. No one knows me the way he knows me, no one loves me the way he loves me. There is other love out there for me. But it’s different. It isn’t this. It isn’t this exact love. It’s better and it’s worse. But I guess that’s sort of the point of love between two people – you can’t re-create it. Every time you love, everyone you love, the love is different. You’re different in it. Right now, I want nothing but to revel in this love.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

374. “It makes you want to cry, the simplicity of it, the smallness of it. You have worked so hard for a life so grand. And now all you want are the smallest freedoms. The daily peace of loving plainly.”

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

375. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

377. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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