Nancy Thayer > Quotes

“It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.”
― Nancy Thayer

“The universe is always speaking to us. ... Sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipities, reminding us to stop, to look around, to believe in something else, something more.”
― Nancy Thayer

“The most terrible thing about marriage, I suppose, is that we know and understand each other’s weaknesses and fears as much as we know our strengths and desires.”
― Nancy Thayer, Between Husbands and Friends

“A good friend once said, “If you break your arm, people rush to bring you flowers, food, and sympathy, but if your mind breaks even just a little, people run away, frightened and dismayed.”
― Nancy Thayer, An Act of Love

“Where’s your self-respect? Why don’t you get yourself in control? Life cannot hang on the love of one other person; you have got to hang your life on yourself.”
― Nancy Thayer, Three Women at the Water's Edge: A Novel

“Perhaps in every close friendship there is an element of, if not competition, then comparison. Perhaps that is one of the things that makes a friend belong especially to us. Somehow, in the secrecy of our hearts, a scale must balance.”
― Nancy Thayer, Between Husbands and Friends

“Music is one of the most efficient mood elevators we have. People in nursing homes, whether ambulatory or even bedridden, whether lucid or not, would be provided with great pleasure by your playing. Maybe they could even dream, return to the best times in their lives, when they were loved.”
― Nancy Thayer, The Guest Cottage

“Two different kinds of people exist: Those who wade cautiously into the shallows and those who throw themselves headlong into the roaring surf.”
― Nancy Thayer, Surfside Sisters

“Mom said when she brought us beachcombing? She told us to always believe in something more. She told us to look at what was right in front of us, and we’d see that even a grain of sand was a miracle. That even a bit of glass was a message, that the universe was full of tricks and clues and signs.”
― Nancy Thayer, Beachcombers

“Perhaps every family is odd.” “You can’t build a straight house out of crooked wood, but you can build a very cozy crooked house,”
― Nancy Thayer, Beachcombers

“Your generation does everything so fast I think you’ve forgotten how to enjoy the pleasures of going slow.”
― Nancy Thayer, The Guest Cottage

“Their friendship is like a tapestry in a drawer. Today is the iron passing over the cloth, smoothing out the wrinkles, bring out the pattern that makes it unique and beautiful.”
― Nancy Thayer, Nantucket Sisters

“Never trust an atom. They make up everything.”
― Nancy Thayer, The Guest Cottage

“having children seems to demand a completely different level of courage,”
― Nancy Thayer, An Island Christmas

“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea —e. e. cummings, “maggie and milly and molly and may”
― Nancy Thayer, Beachcombers

“As she watched, she realized a kind of force field kept her parents together so that even as they fought, they were two halves of a whole. They were joined not only by the laws of marriage and the passage of time and the parenting of a child but by an invisible yet unbreakable bond that held them together even as they struggled to be apart.”
― Nancy Thayer, Family Reunion

“The land doesn’t know who owns it. It was here before owners, and will be here after, content with itself in all seasons.”
― Nancy Thayer, Nantucket Sisters

“Does every woman at some point in her life wander through the sleeping house, looking in at her husband and children, and wonder what she’s doing here, in this particular life?”
― Nancy Thayer, Between Husbands and Friends

“Sometimes it’s quite enough simply to be happy.”
― Nancy Thayer, The Guest Cottage

“Somewhere I read that human beings are the only creatures to spend the present driving themselves crazy about the future.”
― Nancy Thayer, The Guest Cottage

“It’s funny, but if I had to say whom I’m closer to, who knows me better, I’d have a hard time choosing between my husband and my best friend.”
― Nancy Thayer, Between Husbands and Friends

“It hurts my heart, too, sweetie, but you know what? Sometimes crying is a kind of cure. Sometimes that’s what the body and the heart need to do. It’s hard to watch, but it’s not always a bad thing.”
― Nancy Thayer, The Guest Cottage

“The waves had already washed away her footprints. But the tide had left something: a small creamy rock shaped like a heart, polished into a dull gleam by sand and water. Emma picked it up and held it in her hand. Her mother would say: The sea has given you a sign.”
― Nancy Thayer, Beachcombers

“She had had so little of this, Jenny thought, this fierce thrust and yank of family altercation, the daily squabbling, making up, hugging, laughing, bickering, fussing, stomping, snorting, and simple collapsing side by side on the sofa. She’d seen it happen in her friends’ families. It had frightened her. But now she saw how it made people whole, how life was made of dark and light, yin and yang, quarrels and peace. This was how a person learned to forgive. It was how a person learned to care so deeply their heart was laid open as if with a knife.”
― Nancy Thayer, Island Girls

“A marriage is a private bond between two people. But a wedding is a party for everyone, a celebration of life and love, a gathering of friends and relatives to rejoice in life’s good food, champagne, dancing, laughter, and a golden moment in the passage of life. A marriage lasts years, through the good times and bad, and all the banal, boring everyday goings-on of living. A wedding is a brief flash, a unique, exceptional festivity with singing and flowers and good will among men—and women. A marriage is real life. A wedding is a fairy tale. But a wedding is also a promise that we will hold dear the joys of the fairy tale close to our hearts as we go through the years of our marriage.”
― Nancy Thayer, A Nantucket Wedding

“So maybe they didn’t get where they intended to go, but they ended up where they were meant to be.”
― Nancy Thayer, Girls of Summer

“She was aware of the two men in the room, both of them carrying their burden of history, their charms and flaws, their heaviness and guilt, for no adult was ever really without guilt of some sort.”
― Nancy Thayer, Beachcombers

“Relief and something like joy flew up inside Trevor’s chest. They give us these miracles, these pardons, so generously, he thought; they crush our spirits like crashing boulders only to hold open their hands to give us jewels.”
― Nancy Thayer, The Guest Cottage

“Are there any “ordinary” women? I don’t think so.”
― Nancy Thayer, Heat Wave

“distinct. Marriage was like this, she mused, an arabesque coupling, pulling two people into the heart of intimacy and back out again to face the world alone.”
― Nancy Thayer, Family Secrets