Quotes from Megan Chance

I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.

I think The Nightingale is my best, most mature, most moving novel, but maybe that's just because I love these characters. I love the setting.

I love what I call "re-imagining," where I throw everything up in the air and let it fall in a different way. It's not the most efficient way to write a book, but it's how I find the story.

It felt like an oversight to me, something that needed to be corrected. They [women who hid Jewish children] deserved to be understood and remembered.

I love the idea of ordinary women making extraordinary sacrifices.

I love women being the heroes of the piece. There is just something so dramatic and important about this story [The Nightingale ].

The women of the French Resistance astounded me. Isabelle and Vianne [from The Nightingale] are my homage to those brave and forgotten women.

You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.

All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.

The answers are what they are. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they aren't true.

Impatient men are generous ones. Or haven't you learned that by now?

The material world is simply an expression of the mind; that's what so many fail to see. We're so dependent on what is before us that we discount our intuition. Yet if one dismisses instinct, how can one understand or believe in a world that exists beyond one's sight?

People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.

Sight is one of the most easily deceived senses. I could make a coin disappear and your eyes would believe it gone, even if it were merely up my sleeve.

Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.

In the end, there's only one thing you can believe. Bodies are honest; they don't lie.

Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.

The Bible was written by man to serve his own ends. Like society. Like the church. We use such things to control one another, but what right do we have to do so?

The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.

Glitterdust across a broad expanse of blue. Before me, the water unfurled like dark swaths of shadowed silk, colors muted, reflections cast by the lamps hanging from the prows of the gondolas rippling, and my heart swelled at the beauty and the romance of it.

Yes, she was his angel. But can't you guess, my love? She was his demon too.

It seems all spirits need theatrics, eh? Even Christ himself requires incense and holy water. We're a skeptical people. We need convincing.

I've invented it, because there is no other word that celebrates the genius that is me.