Quotes from Terry Brooks

Much of what happens to us in life is due to chance and circumstances beyond our control. Being in the right place at the right time. Discovering that others have impacted us more than we know and for reasons that are not entirely clear. But hard work matters, too. There is an old saying: The harder I work, the luckier I get.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

Sometimes it is better not to speak of what we see in our dreams. Sometimes our dreams belong only to us.

Things change. Life changes. Nothing stays the same.

We use so many words to describe what happens to us, and it all amounts to the same thing. We live out our lives as we are meant to live them—with some choice, with some chance, but mostly as a result of the persons we are.

We live our lives hiding from the things that displease and discomfort us. We reinvent ourselves and our history, constantly placing things in a light most favorable to us. It is in the nature of mankind to do this. Mostly, our deceptions are small ones. But they gather weight through numbers, and having them revealed all at once can be crushing. As well, there are larger truths that, exposed, seem more than we can bear, and so we hide them most carefully.

You spend so much time wondering who you are, don't you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is as plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forger that the answers are mostly inside yourselves. He paused anew. Cats are not included in that analysis. Cats don't waste time wondering about such things. Cats just get on with the business of living.

Writers need their writing; they need their imaginary worlds in order to find piece in, or make sense of, the real world.

The future is a map drawn in the sand, and the tide can wash it away in a moment.

Blind acceptance of what you believe to be the dictates of fate and circumstance is dangerous.

I was thinking about choices and how we make them. About how some are so easy and some so hard. I was thinking how we make some because we want to and some because we have to.

but when you're dying you don't have much time for common sense.

while there was life there was hope.

Anyway, that's the past, and what matters is the future. That's how life works, because it's short and precious and kind of doubtful.

It wasn't simply his choosing to be alone that kept him that way; it was almost a condition of his existence. The feeling that he was an outsider had always been there.

Shea, particularly, had passed the point where his chief emotion was fear; now he felt only a sense of numbness that dulled his mind into self-imposed surrender, a robot-like acceptance of the fact that he was being led to the proverbial slaughter.

Put the past behind you and the future ahead where they belong and spend your time in the present with the rest of us.

you can be homeless in your heart, too. You can be empty inside yourself because you have no spiritual center. You can wander through life without any real sense of who you are or where you belong. You can exist without purpose or cause.

We do not always recognize the thing that comes to destroy us.

He wanted to tell himself or maybe even her that he would never understand women, but he had a feeling he wasn't the first man to formulate this opinion and very likely wouldn't be the last and that it really didn't matter anyway.

Because life's dictates did not allow for quick and easy distinctions between right and wrong or good and bad. Choices were made between shades of gray, and there was healing and harm to be weighed on both sides of each.

Life was a myriad of twists and turns that no one could unravel, a path that must be traveled to be understood.

The future was painted on a canvas of infinite reach; it entailed too many connections and joinings. Change one and you changed others. No amount of insight would enable a single individual to decipher it all.

I know you hate yourself for how you are. I know you hate how you look and how you know others will look at you if you reveal yourself. But sometimes, with people who matter, you have to reveal even the worst of what you believe yourself to be. You have to have faith that it won't make a difference. I would never judge you for how you look. Who you are is what matters, and who you are is always buried deep inside.