Rebecca Makkai > Quotes

“I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved.”
― Rebecca Makkai

“But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But listen: You two are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That’s a miracle. I just want to say that.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone’s life. Making room for someone in yours.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“If you had to choose when, in the timeline of the earth, you got to live—wouldn’t you choose the end? You haven’t missed anything, then. You die in 1920, you miss rock and roll. You die in 1600, you miss Mozart. Right? I mean, the horrors pile up, too, but no one wants to die before the end of the story.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“You’ll never know anyone’s marriage but your own. And even then, you’ll only know half of it.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“I might be the villain of this story.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower

“Stupid men and their stupid violence. Tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn't you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot's dick?”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved. They were college professors and actors and scientists and poets. They got to college and sat on dorm floors drinking coffee, amazed they'd finally found their soul mates. They always dressed a little out of season. Their names were enshrined on the pink cards in the pockets of all the forgotten hardbacks in every library basement in America. If the librarians were lazy enough or nostalgic enough or smart enough, those names would stay there forever.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower

“Asher said, "Does it really ever go anywhere?"
"Does what?"
"Love. Does it vanish?"
Yale looked at his own hand, resting on the dashboard to keep himself steady whenever Asher braked suddenly. "I mean, we never want it to. But it does, doesn't it?"
Asher said, "I think that's the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“They meant well, all of them. How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“I hate that we have to live in the middle of history. We make enough mess on our own.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“The thing is," Teddy said, "the disease itself feels like a judgment. We've all got a little Jesse Helms on our shoulder, right? If you got it from sleeping with a thousand guys, then it's a judgment on your promiscuity. If you got it from sleeping with one guy once, that's almost worse, it's like a judgment on all of us, like the act itself is the problem and not the number of times you did it. And if you got it because you thought you couldn't, it's a judgment on your hubris. And if you got it because you knew you could and you didn't care, it's a judgment on how much you hate yourself. Isn't that why the world loves Ryan White so much? How could God have it out for some poor kid with a blood disorder? But then people are still being terrible. They're judging him for just being sick, not even for the way he got it.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“This disease has magnified all our mistakes. Some stupid thing you did when you were nineteen, the one time you weren't careful. And it turns out that was the most important day of your life.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower

“She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she’d been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of men she’d never met. Just as she’d been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone’s careful plans to shit. Just as she’d once been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through. She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick?”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“He said, "Everyone knows how short life is. Fiona and I know it especially. But no one ever talks about how long it is.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“And second, everyone is so weird, but they're all completely accepted. It's like, okay, you have a pumpkin head, and that guy's made of tin, and you're a talking chicken, but what the hell, let's do a road trip.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower

“Cecily said, "That's the difference between optimism and naivety. No one in this room is naive. Naive people haven't been through real trials yet, so they think it could never happen to them. Optimists have been through it already, and we keep getting up each day because we believe we can keep it from happening again. Or we trick ourselves into thinking it."
Richard said, "All belief is a trick.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“I no longer believe I can save people. I've tried, and I've failed, and while I'm sure there are people out there in the world with that particular gift, I'm not one of them...But books, on the other hand: I do still believe that books can save you.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower

“...but here it hung, and it was an artifact of love. Well, of a hopeless doomed selfish ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed?”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it's true. Not that they had bad intentions, just...you always want to believe you're important in someone's life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren't.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.”
― Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You

“We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.”
― Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You

“We'd been through something our parents hadn't. The war made us older than our parents. And when you're older than your parents, what are you going to do? Who's going to show you how to live?”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower

“I think that’s the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“[...] Everyone that spring just wandered. You'd find a friend in a cafe, and even if you'd hardly known them you'd run and kiss them, and you'd exchange news about who was dead. I don't know how you could compare it to anything else. I don't know how you could."

Yale had missed a step. "Compare what?"

"Well, you! Your friends! I don't know how it's like anything other than war!”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers