Colleen Hoover’s “Reminders of Him” is one of those books that leaves bruises. Kenna Rowan walks out of prison after five years, desperate to reconnect with her four-year-old daughter, and the story follows her through every locked door, cold shoulder, and flicker of hope that comes with trying to rebuild a life most people don’t want you to have. The quotes that come out of this book are raw, and they hit close to home whether you’ve lived through something similar or not.
Hoover has a way of packing entire emotional arcs into single lines. The quotes below reflect the weight of loss, the slow work of healing, and the messy courage it takes to love again. For more on this novel, check out the Reminders of Him Summary and Takeaways post.
I pulled together the quotes that stopped me cold while reading. These are the ones that linger.
Best Reminders of Him Quotes by Colleen Hoover
Here are the most powerful quotes from Colleen Hoover’s Reminders of Him:
“There was before you and there was during you. For some reason, I never thought there would be an after you.”
“Grudges are heavy, but for the people hurting the most, I suppose forgiveness is even heavier.”
“I take a drink of my coffee and close my eyes and cry because life can be so fucking cruel and hard, and I’ve wanted to quit living it so many times, but then moments like these remind me that happiness isn’t some permanent thing we’re all trying to achieve in life, it’s merely a thing that shows up every now and then, sometimes in tiny doses that are just substantial enough to keep us going.”
“Now that I’ve forgiven myself, the reminders of him only make me smile.”
“I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t a mess. I was. But I also wasn’t given the tools to be anything other than what I was.”
“Sometimes things seem good and perfect in the moment, but when you get hours of reflection afterward, the perfection can morph into something else.”
“In the end, if there’s nothing good going on in your life, almost every song becomes depressing, no matter what it’s about.”
“It’s also strange thinking you know someone but then later realizing maybe you didn’t know them at all.”
“I want to learn how to talk to people without wishing I could retract every word I said.”
“Sometimes I wonder if we’re all born with equal amounts of good and evil. What if no one person is more or less malevolent than another, and that we all just release our bad at different times, in different ways?”
“Her face is a work of art. I wish there was a picture of it hanging on a wall in a museum somewhere so I could stand in front of it and stare at it for as long as I wanted.”
“I don’t like that the one person I dislike most in this world reminds me of the person I love the most.”
“When our fingers touch, I feel something else trapped in my chest other than my voice. Maybe it’s a few extra heartbeats. Maybe it’s an erupting volcano.”
“People say you fall in love, but fall is such a sad word when you think about it. Falls are never good. You fall on the ground, you fall behind, you fall to your death. Whoever was the first person to say they fell in love must have already fallen out of it. Otherwise, they’d have called it something much better.”
“Crying seems to be the only thing left in life that I’m good at. Crying and making bad decisions.”
“So, you decide right now, right here. Are you gonna live in your sadness or are you gonna die in it?”
“Life is a cruel, cruel thing, the way it picks and chooses who to bully. We’re given these shitty circumstances and told by society that we, too, can live the American dream. But what they don’t tell us is that dreams almost never come true. It’s why they call it the American dream rather than
the American reality. Our reality is that you’re dead, I’m in orientation for a shitty job making minimum wage, and our daughter is being raised by people who aren’t us. Reality is depressing as fuck.”
“sometimes we do things for people we love, even though we wouldn’t choose to do those things for ourselves.”
“Maybe the best way to cope with the loss of the people we love is to find them in as many places and things as we possibly can.”
“I couldn’t breathe because you were dead, and how was I supposed to breathe when you had no air?”
“Some things can be forgiven, but sometimes an action is so painful the memory of it can still crush a person ten years down the road.”
“There are people who find peace in forgiveness, and then there are others who look at forgiveness as a betrayal. To them, forgiving me would feel like betraying their own son. I can only hope they change their minds someday, but until then, this is my life. This is where it’s led me.”
“It proves that time, distance, and devastation allow people enough opportunity to craft villains out of people they don’t even know.”
“it’s better to grow up knowing your imperfect mother is fighting for you than to grow up knowing she doesn’t give a shit about you.”
Final Thoughts on Reminders of Him Quotes
Hoover wrote a book that doesn’t let you off easy. These Reminders of Him quotes pull from a place most authors are afraid to go, and they land because they feel true. Grief, second chances, the way love can coexist with anger. If any of these lines stayed with you, that probably says something about where you are right now. And that’s okay.
