Quotes from Terry Brooks

The highlander seemed to float through life very much the same as a cloud in an empty sky, touching nothing, leaving no trace of his passing.

If you get the urge, then write about it.

When you can do that, little Wren, when you can accept the wearing down and the eroding, then you can do anything. How did I manage to keep going out nights? I just told myself I didn't matter all that much—that those in here mattered more. You know something? It's not so hard really. You just have to get past the fear.

We have thousands and thousands of people living homeless on the streets of our cities at the same time that we have men and women earning millions of dollars a year running companies that make products whose continued usage will ruin our health, our environment, and our values. The irony is incredible. It's obscene.

Most of all, he needed a challenge—because that was what gave life meaning.

if you wanted something done, it was never a good idea to rely on others. Others were never as committed to achieving your goals as you were.

Some decisions cannot be made in advance of the time that will demand them. We cannot always anticipate the way in which things will happen and therefore cannot anticipate what we will do. We must accept that.

If you're a real writer, you infuse your characters with truths from your own life. The old saw is, Write What You Know. I think it equally appropriate to add. Write Who You Are. Give your readers little insights into how you think. Share your feelings and beliefs in a way that makes other question their own, thereby requiring them in some small way to reevaluate their lives. Good storytelling compels us to do this.

A building is a home if the people who inhabit it have memories and love and a place in the world. Otherwise, it is just a building, a shelter against the elements, and it can never be anything more.

Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight.

Commitment is a journey that works best when each step taken is carefully measured.

Centuries of enlightenment and progress vanished virtually overnight because Men couldn't find a way to use it wisely and purposefully.

There are many forms of magic in this world, High Lord. Some come in large packages, some in small. Some work with fire and strength of body and heard ... and some work with revelation.

Let the stillness be, High Lord. Do not disturb it. If you are able, listen to its voice—but let it be.

We never know what we can be or do until the need is there and we are tested by it.

But Miles had always approached life differently than he, always preferring to blend in with his surroundings rather than to shape them, always preferring to make do. He just didn't understand that there were some things in life a man simply should not accept.

All those men had died for some senseless reason, died perhaps without ever knowing exactly what they had fought to accomplish.

Fantasy writing must be grounded in both truth and life experience if it is to work. It can be as inventive and creative as the writer can make it, a whirlwind of images and plot twists, but it cannot be built on a foundation of air. The world must be identifiable with our own, must offer us a frame of reference we can recognize." "Fantasy stories work because the writer has interwoven bits and pieces of reality with imagination to form a personal vision.

No one said anything. The midday heat beat down on them, baking their bodies within the oven of clothes long since gone stiff with sweat and dirt, their minds as tired as their expectations. Hawk couldn't remember his last real bath. None of them had done more than wash off a little dirt and cool down their faces at the end of each day's trek since they had set out. Before that, things hadn't been much better. Food was growing scarce, too. Time was as thin as hope.

It was not so much a sense of failure that he had experienced as a sense of his own limitations. You cannot do everything you might wish that you could do.

As if you could ever protect your children from what life might bring their way. Or even from themselves and their impulses.

Hindsight should have lent clarity to his actions; it did not. Rather, he felt a lingering sense of confusion. Everything seemed to jumble together in his mind--all the disparate incomplete reasoning, all the emotions that intertwined and colored. They would not sort themselves out for him; they would not arrange themselves in a neat orderly fashion. They merely shuffled about like stray sheep and he chased after them hopelessly.

He laughed in maddened frenzy, knowing somehow that he was no longer in a world of living creatures, but a world of death where soulless beings wandered in hopeless search of escape from their eternal prison. He stumbled on amidst them, laughing, talking, even singing gaily, his mind no longer a part of his mortal being. All about him, the creatures of the dark world followed in cringing companionship, knowing that the maddened mortal was almost one of them.

Often, it is the least likely among us who is in a position to accomplish the most.