Jacquelyn Mitchard > Quotes

“Cats regard people as warm-blooded furniture.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard

“There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Breakdown Lane

“When someone you love that much leaves you behind there isn't as much of you left to die when your own time comes.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard

“Feelings change fast when you're a teenager.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, What We Saw at Night

“Friendship for me is made from a tapestry of personalities, each of whom shares a part of all I care about.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard

“Nothing better for the hormones and worse for the heart than the right boy at the right time.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, What We Saw at Night

“There are no coincidences. If something happens and we don't understand the reason, that doesn't mean there is no reason. It means that the reason will later be revealed, likely not in this life.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, Cage of Stars

“I do a great deal of research. I don’t want anyone to say, ‘That could not have happened.’ It may be fiction, but it has to be true.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard

“You have that syndrome that chronically sick kids get, like overdeveloped conscience syndrome," she announced.
"You made that up."
Juliet laughed. "I did. You have it though. You always feel like you're inconveniencing somebody."
"I am always inconveniencing somebody. I'm an inconvenient person."
"But you're not. We didn't ask to be born this way, Allie. The world owes you one. Not the other way around.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, What We Saw at Night

“It was an epiphany, the kind only a horrible trauma can induce.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, What We Saw at Night

“Already there was black rain inside me.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, Cage of Stars

“I loved the terrier quality Stuart had. He thought he was such a tough guy.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Most Wanted

“They talk about everything that happened right in front of me like I’m not there. They don’t see me. When you don’t see someone, she disappears. That’s why I’m vanishing.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, Now You See Her

“And it was that, the beyond-grief, the sealing-up of a mind still expected to produce order and plans, which she dreaded.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean

“It was like a lucky pebble kept in my pocket that got so shined up from rubbing against the denim that no one could tell it had ever been an ordinary stone.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, Cage of Stars

“Now I know that, when you lose a child, it’s not the same as losing a contemporary, even a beloved husband or wife. When you lose a child, you grieve as a child grieves, which is to say, you grieve backward. You don’t get better as time passes, you get worse. Time does not take you closer to acceptance, only further from the one you love.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Good Son

“Maybe we don't get a long past. Maybe we just get a future.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, Two If by Sea

“What should he say to this woman that wouldn’t entail ornamenting the tunic of lies he wore?”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, Two If by Sea

“I’ll always remember our first night together, you so flushed and shy, me knowing what I know but scared too because you are the first one I loved.

We poured our loneliness into each other and filled the emptiness and dark corners of this place with joy.

I think of your long straight back, your strong legs, your hair on the pillow, your dark eyes close, and say your name over and over...it is the sound of bells.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Most Wanted

“This infuriated my father, who said BYU was a “meat market” and that if Heavenly Father didn’t intend women to understand economics, why did He give them charge of households, and if women weren’t intended to understand philosophy, why were they the first teachers of the word, and if they weren’t intended to practice psychology, why did the Lord intend they should be mothers?”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, Cage of Stars

“was picking my son up at the prison gates when I spotted the mother of the girl he had murdered. Two independent clauses, ten words each, joined by an adverb, made up entirely of words that would once have been unimaginable to think, much less say.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Good Son

“She wanted to take him someplace fragrant and homely, like the Pepper Pot in town, and buy vanilla Cokes and steak sandwiches for him and for Sam. They could sit and talk in a warm ring of yellow light until all of them felt full and strong”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean

“You'll never regret eating blueberries or working up a sweat.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard

“It was that palpable sense of presence shoved up against the reality of absence, like hot against cold, that really threatened to buckle the whole mass.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean

“It’s about recognizing that sometimes, something survives, something important in nature thrives not because we protect it but because we don’t know about it. Conservation can sometimes be the most benign neglect. Some things require not our help but our absence.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, A Very Inconvenient Scandal

“friable”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean

“After a certain span of years, a man who has no family of his own becomes if not dangerous, then impervious.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, Two If By Sea

“Everyone yearns for heaven, and nothing binds you to the hope of eternal life like that kind of defeat on earth.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, Cage of Stars

“Keith Fu, my department chair, dropped by my office. he brought me a latte. I'd just found a fortune cooking in my pocked and I showed it to Keith. Its said, I cannot help you, I am only a cookie.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Good Son

“Do you think I should explore forgiveness more?"
Why was she asking this of me, of all the beings in the known universe? In concept, it sounded like the absolute pinnacle of civilization, the best humanity could hope for. How would it work out in reality?”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Good Son