Little Fires Everywhere Quotes

“A part of her wanted to study Mia ...to understand why...she did what she did.”

“You know what they’d say? We raised you better than that. ”

“...the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them.”

“She had learned that when people were bent on doing something they believed was a good deed, it was usually impossible to dissuade them.”

“Mia could not help but notice her daughter’s infatuation with the Richardsons.”

“She had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing.”

“People are like that, too, you know. They start over.”

“One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules... was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.”

“Maybe at birth everyone should be given to a family of a different race to be raised. Maybe that would solve racism once and for all.”

“Later people would say that the signs had been there all along: that Izzy was a little lunatic, that there had always been something off about the Richardson family, that as soon as they heard the sirens that morning they knew something terrible had happened.”

“In her month and a half of turbulent motherhood, Bebe did not once seek help from a psychologist or a doctor... she had no idea where to turn... She did not know how to find the social workers who might have helped her... she did not know how to file for welfare.”

“In Shaker Heights there was a plan for everything.”

“It bothers you, doesn’t it?” Mia said suddenly. “I think you can’t imagine. Why anyone would choose a different life from the one you’ve got. Why anyone might want something other than a big house with a big lawn, a fancy car, a job in an office. Why anyone would choose anything different than what you’d choose.”

“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow.”

“It was more appropriate to give her a new name to celebrate the start of her new life.”

“Inside her, there was a speck of Brian, a spark of him turning over and over within her... something she was going to have anyway, so why not now?”

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time.”

“It’s you. The indentured servant. I mean, the tenant-slash-cleaning lady.”

“The firemen said there were little fires everywhere,” Lexie said. “Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident.”

“In all her years of itinerant living, Mia had developed one rule: Don’t get attached to any place, to any apartment, to anything. To anyone.”

“What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?”

“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.”