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

“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

“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

“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

I loved the terrier quality Stuart had. He thought he was such a tough guy.

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

“It was an epiphany, the kind only a horrible trauma can induce.”

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

“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

“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

“Already there was black rain inside me.”

— 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

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

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

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

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

“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

“Maybe we don't get a long past. Maybe we just get a future.”

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

“It's faith that really takes the courage, the belief in things unseen.”

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

The ideal structure for a family is one that remains so.

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

“Anybody can become a widow. There aren't any special qualifications. It happens in less time than it takes to draw a breath. It doesn't require the planning, for example, that it takes to become a wife or a mother or any of the other ritual roles of womanhood.”

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

Here is how it is for women. We become our schedules. That starts to feel good. Then it starts to feel necessary. Then it starts to feel like everything.

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

Being wanted is the tender heel of everything human.

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

“Our sons and daughters are only passing through ... If we are lucky, they always will consider our home their harbor, but they are headed out to the open sea, almost from the first.”

— Jacquelyn Mitchard

“Work is a slice of your life. It's not the entire pizza.”

— Jacquelyn Mitchard