Quotes from Tracy Chevalier

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.

As I get older, I use less jewelry - necklace or earrings each morning, not both; my clothes are getting more basic - fewer colours and simpler cuts; and my make-up is stripped back to basics.

We do not need such things to help us to see God, " I countered. "We have His Word, and that isenough.

My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8 A.M. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain.

It's those little daily incidents of life that are dramatic, and if you put a frame around it , suddenly they become much bigger and much more important than you ever imagined.

I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.

Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.

We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.

Younger women tend to be busier, wearing more layers and more make-up. I don't know if it's because older women are more confident, or just that we don't care any more. But that pared-down approach is the same with the sentences I write; I take out adjectives and adverbs and keep the description to a minimum.

Only thieves and children run.

Pieter would be pleased with the rest of the coins, the debt now settled. I would not have cost him anything. A maid came free.

I had always thought of the sea as a boundary keeping me in my place on land. Now, though, it became an opening.

I never said I didn't want to marry. It just didn't happen-Iam not the sort of lady a man chooses to marry, for I am too plain and too serious. Now I am reconciled to being on my own.

I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life." [ Woman's Day magazine, March 12, 2002]

We do not need such things to help us to see God," I countered. "We have His Word, and that is enough.

I felt as if my parents had pushed me into the street, that a deal had been made and I was being passed into the hands of a man. At least he is a good man, I thought, even if his hands are not as clean as they could be.

He made me feel an idiot, even when I knew he was a bigger one than I.

But dying was no drama. Dying was cold and hard and painful, and dull. It went on too long. I was exhausted and growing bored with it. Now I had too much time to think about whether I was going to die from the tide

That's how fossil hunting is: It takes over, like a hunger, and nothing else matters but what you find. And even when you find it, you still start looking again the next minute, because there might be something even better waiting.

What made him most attractive was that he was attracted to her. Another's interest can be a powerful stimulant. She could feel his eyes on her as an almost physical pressure.

Warp threads are thicker than the weft, and made of a coarser wool as well. I think of them as like wives. Their work is not obvious - all you can see are the ridges they make under the colorful weft threads. But if they weren't there, there would be no tapestry. Georges would unravel without me.