Top 60 Vera Jane Cook Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Morning sounds came in through my window like the world made sense.”

— Vera Jane Cook

2. “Insinuation is not truth, just conjecture.”

— Vera Jane Cook

3. “Nobody could understand the past except the people from it.”

— Vera Jane Cook

4. “You wouldn’t know sense if it jumped up and bit you in the ass, Angus. You can’t recognize it ’cause it’s a foreign language to you. Sense is the coin in your pocket, not what should be there inside your head.”

— Vera Jane Cook

5. “Nothing worse than grey light coming in your window on a Sunday morning. Personally, I don’t like the color grey. It reminds me of the absence of color. I know, I know, people say grey is a color but it isn’t. It’s grey. Grey like smoke, like clouds, like ash. Grey like dirt and shale. Grey is Mr. Wiley’s hair and a cat bit me once was grey. Grey is a deadly color. Grey gets between me and the sun and threatens rain. It’s a downer, grey is. Don’t ever wear grey, people are likely to avoid you.”

— Vera Jane Cook

6. “I live in a world of lies, I might as well learn early that lies come with the territory. You befriend people, you grow up and marry, you work and you lie to everyone, your boss, your spouse and your best friend. You tell big lies, little lies, the world is a bunch of lies. You teach your children to lie because you believe that the only protection they will ever have from any kind of harm will be in the lies they tell.”

— Vera Jane Cook

7. “Memories that cease to be painful are still nostalgic and nostalgia made her sad, always about a loss of time.”

— Vera Jane Cook

8. “Jealousy is a human emotion,” she said with a smile. “If you weren’t jealous if another man flirted with me I’d be terribly disappointed.”

— Vera Jane Cook

9. “I mean, how does that crazy preacher know where the dead go and how the hell does he know the dead like being there? He’s trying to make it sound like the only reason we get born is to bite the dust.”

— Vera Jane Cook

10. “He had become like an old sweater, full of holes but never to be discarded, too many cold nights to find it in the back of a drawer and pull out.”

— Vera Jane Cook

11. “She doesn’t respond, of course. She smirks. I guess she thinks of a smirk as a greeting.”

— Vera Jane Cook

12. “Days have a sameness. Even new, they offer little beyond weather changes and sudden deaths.”

— Vera Jane Cook

13. “The devil is a gentleman in disguise, Bessie.”

— Vera Jane Cook

14. “The ashes of our mistakes are between us. There’s still smoke from the fire, isn’t there?”

— Vera Jane Cook

15. “And the ghosts walked into my memory, into the happiness, into the pain of my future, and they wished me well. I turned, as though I saw them in the unfolding season, in the beauty and in the death of autumn. Perhaps I had, perhaps I had.”

— Vera Jane Cook

16. “Air hung heavy like wet clothes caught flapping in the rain made it hard to breathe.”

— Vera Jane Cook

17. “Daddy came and got me after dinner. Mama must have told him I knew that dead girl ’cause he was eyeing me all through Mama’s pot roast like maybe I was going to get suicidal and hang myself from the ceiling light in my bedroom after the two helpings of dessert I took.”

— Vera Jane Cook

18. “I looked back at the two of them. I knew I didn’t have the sharpest knives carving my Christmas turkey but I had what I had.”

— Vera Jane Cook

19. “I should have seen his weaknesses and only given him a section of myself but I loved him to my core, no matter who he was. There were no hidden places in my heart that would not welcome him or any sacred ground inside my being that he could not walk upon.”

— Vera Jane Cook

20. “Clarissa thought that was the problem with toothpaste, it always wound up looking like it had a drunken binge the night before and was spitting up all over itself.”

— Vera Jane Cook

21. “I kept wondering if this was going to be my first experience of love or if this was going to be my first experience of being sweet talked into parting with my virginity.”

— Vera Jane Cook

22. “Love is not only blind it’s imbecilic.”

— Vera Jane Cook

23. “It was way too soon to feel my virginity was flirting with a sudden death.”

— Vera Jane Cook

24. “Good decorating is a story, Pleasant. It’s a story of taste. It’s a story of personality, of character. Look at any good decorated room and I defy you to tell me it doesn’t have a story to tell. When I see a well painted room I want to meet the storyteller behind the color chosen. I truly do. Show me a man with taste and I’ll show you a man with characte.”

— Vera Jane Cook

25. “He’s going to be famous. He’s just so out there.”

— Vera Jane Cook

26. “Roland was handsome, movie star perfect, and he moved knowing it.”

— Vera Jane Cook

27. “He would ask her, of course, and they would honeymoon at the Canary Inn, but that particular weekend wouldn’t be about forever, not just yet. It would be about the discovery Bessie made, about love, how it boomerangs toward you on quiet feet and tugs softly, never raging or insisting on anything other than recognition, and an unencumbered path of return.”

— Vera Jane Cook

28. “Life must be much more evident when one is always suffering.”

— Vera Jane Cook

29. “That sounds like Chloe, she appeased people to keep them from getting upset. To Chloe, lies held purpose.”

— Vera Jane Cook

30. “She would have preferred being beautiful to looking as if she were perpetually sucking on sour drops.”

— Vera Jane Cook

31. “The passing years often rob people of the truth. But then again, those passing years also allow people to recreate the truth.”

— Vera Jane Cook

32. “She heard his scream, Graham’s scream, and she smiled. She would bear the pain. She would heal. He would not.”

— Vera Jane Cook

33. “His smile was a whole conversation just inviting you to enter in.”

— Vera Jane Cook

34. “Everybody has got to hate someone, human nature.”

— Vera Jane Cook

35. “No truth on this goddamn planet ever made its way out of your mouth. If truth was hanging out of your nose you’d blow that goddamn truth bugger into a snot rag and toss it into a fire pit.”

— Vera Jane Cook

36. “There are opportunities to find mistakes around every corner you turn, Richard.”

— Vera Jane Cook

37. “I wonder why the dead can’t talk, look at all the crimes we’d solve if the damn dead would just Ouija board us our answers, or tell all those weird psychic people who killed ’em.”

— Vera Jane Cook

38. “I am well practiced in avoidance and indifference though the hollowness in my soul resents her absence; I wear the mask I must.”

— Vera Jane Cook

39. “That’s the thing about fine things, they couldn’t alienate, they had to invite, as hers did.”

— Vera Jane Cook

40. “Clarissa remembered why she didn’t like him, he was astucious, an ambiguous villain in a gentleman’s three piece suit.”

— Vera Jane Cook

41. “I may never know Mama as well as I wanted to but I knew how gentle she was. I had been a jig saw puzzle for her just waiting to be touched and made whole. But now, I was free from hurting her. She was looking at me, not as a loss but as a gain.”

— Vera Jane Cook

42. “When friends stopped coming by, the days were upset by it, the redundancy of routine, once altered, needed to find new distractions, like puzzle pieces that need connection in order to form a whole.”

— Vera Jane Cook

43. “Why my husband, Savannah?” Clarissa whispered. It was still a shock after all these years, a betrayal with an endless sting.”

— Vera Jane Cook

44. “I felt at any moment I might be swooped up and eaten by the profound sad tales of a Weeping Willow.”

— Vera Jane Cook

45. “Angus had been hurt deeply by what John Peter had done, that he might have lost a friend in such a horrible way. I could see that. But even aside from the stupid thing John Peter had done, Angus was hurting for me, feeling my pain, taking it with him as he rode off. He might not have understood all of what I was feeling but he had embraced it. He didn’t get it after Millie died, but now he knew what loss could do to a person. Empathy just might save the world one day.”

— Vera Jane Cook

46. “Clarissa noticed his eyes, they were like indifferent tides, shielding knowledge of an impending storm.”

— Vera Jane Cook

47. “He stood there breathing hard, getting fat on bad news.”

— Vera Jane Cook

48. “I guess, if you ever had God figured out the universe would be split in thousands of pieces and it would disappear and we who have dreamed ourselves alive would all fade away in all those splintered parts. What I mean to say is, it isn’t meant for us to know anything.”

— Vera Jane Cook

49. “They looked over stimulated by something that had distracted them from their usual boredom and lazy egocentric paragraphs about nothing at all that ever held any interest for me.”

— Vera Jane Cook

50. “Sometimes, when husbands stay out of the way, friendship was easier between women.”

— Vera Jane Cook