Terry Brooks Quotes

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.

It was the nature of things, of course. Life went on. The best you could do was to hold on to the memories that were important to you, so that even if everyone else forgot, you would remember.

We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two.
I think maybe we learn a few things each time that we don't forget. A few things that stick with us. It's just hard to pass those things on to those who come after us because if they didn't live through it, they don't view it the same way we do. If you don't experience something firsthand, it's a lot harder to accept. Terry Brooks, Bearers of the Black Staff, p 89

Events and circumstances sometimes conspire against us; if we insist on inflexibility for the purpose of maintaining our beliefs, we end up compromising ourselves nevertheless. We salvage one set of principles only to forsake another.

It is in the nature of things to want to believe that what's familiar and comfortable will last forever.

Not everything we do in this world is about us, Panther. Sometimes we have do things for other reasons. Sometimes we've got to forget about ourselves and help others. If not, what's the point?

If you get the urge, then write about it.

If you do not love what you do, if you are not appropriately grateful for the chance to create something magical each time you sit down at the computer or with a pencil and paper in hand, somewhere along the way your writing will betray you.

Human minds are not equipped to face the realities of nonmaterial existence on this sphere. It is too much for any mortal to bear for long." Again

I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.

Love supplies a kind of strength that can withstand even death.

Testing of self is a regular part of our own lives, so it seems natural to make it a part of the lives of my characters, as well, albeit on a much different level.

What you write chooses you.

She had grown to accept unpleasantness as a part of life rather than to struggle futilely against truths that could not be changed.

What mattered was removing himself from his present existence in an effort to find his future.

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

Friendship doesn't have anything to do with shoring up weakness. It has to do with respect and consideration for those you care about. It has to do with wanting to give something back to those you admire.

Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on.

The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.

but sometimes when you took a chance it was better to hold nothing back and to go all-in. He

Our problem is not one of ignorance; it is one of complacency. We are too quick to accept the life we know and not quick enough to embrace the life we only imagine. We think that events must proceed as we dictate, and that no other voice will ever have meaning but ours

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.

Your past was your heritage and the foundation on which you were built. You couldn't start over. You could only repair and move on.

A cat never discusses his business with humans, not even Princesses. A cat never explains and never apologizes. A cat never alibis. You must accept a cat as it is and for what it is and not expect more than the pleasure of its company.

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.

Either you believed in something or you didn't - you couldn't have it both ways and be honest with yourself.

Life just swept you along and never took you back to where you had been.

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.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

What kind of world permitted such terrible injustice, where good men were stripped of everything and soulless creatures of malice and hatred survived to glory in their pointless death?

This search is all about faith. Faith that what's clearly impossible might somehow turn out not to be. Faith that we can do what we never would have thought we could. Faith to keep going when everything tells us we should turn back.

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

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

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

Nothing is lost that we do not first see as lost. Visions born of fear give birth to our failing.
Visions born of hope give birth to our success.
What is possible lives within us, and it only remains for us to discover it.

Evil contained is not evil destroyed.

You were guaranteed so little in this life, and so sometimes you took what was offered even though you knew it might end badly.

Believe me, Kinson, the potensial for evil lodges deep in every man, myself included. We restrain it better, keep it buried deeper, but it lives within us.

On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.

We grow as best we can under the circumstances given us. What good does it do to second-guess ourselves years after the fact? Better that we simply try to understand why we are as we are and then better ourselves by learning from that.

There were times that being a half-blood bothered him, but Flick had stoutly insisted that it was a distinct advantage because it gave him the instincts and character of two races to build upon

You have to trust in who and what you are. You have to trust in the dream you have been given. You have believed in it until now, haven't you?

He had never been in love. He had not known what it would feel like. He understood what the term meant, but his life had not allowed for exploring its possibilities. There had been few he had really loved. His parents; Michael. That was it. And that was love of a different kind. Less intense, less hungry. What he felt for Simralin went so far beyond anything manageable that it shocked him. He could tell himself it was because he had found her beautiful in a way that transcended anything he had ever known. But his attraction to her was a response to so much more. To her self-confidence and way of speaking. To her smile and the quirky way she lifted one eyebrow when she was amused. To the way she carried herself. To the way she looked at him.

Genocide is like a dessert. It is made of the flesh and bones of woman and children, it is sweetened with the blood of the innocent, and it is baked in the ovens of Auschwitz. There were truths to be learnt and there was wisdom to be gained ... but there was a price to to be paid as well. You could not brush up against the future and escape unscathed. You could not see into the forbidden and avoid damage to your sight.

When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment.

Do not be so quick to accept as truth what is only conjecture.

Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger, travel too far that road and the way is lost.

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.

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

Believe for long enough and it will come to pass. Believe it might be so, and it will be so.

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.

We are the sum of our lives and not simply pieces of them. We are the whole of our time in this world.

Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.

Keep talking, and you'll eventually sound like a complete idiot instead of just a half-wit.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

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.

Sometimes change is necessary. Sometimes we recognize the need for it, but we don't know how to achieve it. We misread its nature. We think it is beyond us, failing to recognize that our inability to act is a problem of our own making. Change is the solution we require, but it is not a goal that is easily reached. Identifying and disposing of what is troubling to us requires caution and understanding.

We all struggle with what's right and wrong, Paxon. That's the nature of our lives. We have to figure out what we can live with, and hope that what we do to bring it about doesn't exact a cost that's too high. We have to decide where to draw the line.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

trained army. The

I would never leave your side for a moment if it were possible. But it is not. It is not in the nature of life that we can be together in all things.

I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.

But your responsibilities are sometimes given you without choice, without consent.

that the wars of the past were slowly being forgotten. Shea believed that one could turn his back on the past and build a new world with the future, never understanding that the future was inextricably tied to the past, an interwoven tapestry of events and ideas that would never be entirely severed.

Central governments have always been the greatest danger to mankind. Now there are none - small communities are the new rule of life. Some things are better left alone by everyone.

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.

Humans populated the world now, and they had no understanding of magic. All they understood was how to savage the land, how to take what they wanted and not care about the harm it caused.

It's the age-old tale of complacency, Shea." The tall warrior sighed deeply and stretched as he rose. "We may be standing on the brink of the greatest war in a thousand years, but no one wants to accept the fact. Everyone gets in the same rut - let a few take care of the gates to the city while the rest forget and go back to their homes. It becomes a habit - depending on a few to protect the rest. And then one day ... the few are not enough, and the enemy is within the city - right through the open gates ...

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.

They became sleepwalkers in a world of half-dreams and rambling thoughts with no break in the wearing march or the never-ending, silent black trunks that came and passed in countless thousands.

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.

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.

Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones.

THE NAME OF THE WIND marks the debut of a writer we would all do well to watch. Patrick Rothfuss has real talent, and his tale of Kvothe is deep and intricate and wondrous.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.

Yet already their destruction begins. It comes upon them gradually, in little ways. Bit by bit their belief in themselves erodes. A growing cynicism pervades their lives. Small acts of kindness and charity are abandoned as pointless and somehow indicative of weakness. Little failures of behavior lead to bigger ones. It is not enough to ignore the discourtesies of others; discourtesies must be repaid in kind. Men are intolerant and judgmental. They are without grace. If one man proclaims that God has spoken to him, another quickly proclaims that his God is false. If the homeless cannot find shelter, then surely they are to blame for their condition. If the poor do not have jobs, then surely it is because they will not work. If sickness strikes down those whose lifestyle differs from our own, then surely they have brought it on themselves.

Past, present, and future, the symbiosis of our lives," the old man continued quietly, gently. "Our birth, our life, our death, all tied into a single package that we spend our time on this earth unwrapping. Sometimes we see clearly what it is we are looking at. Sometimes we do not. Sometimes things happen to distract or deceive us, and we must look more carefully at what it is we hold.

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.

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

Who would you be but who you are?

I haven't made up my mind about doing anymore Landover books.

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

Life went on, no matter the magnitude of the events that influenced it.

A reluctance to acknowledge that there may be wisdom in youth would be foolish.

Your belief is as important as your physical strength. You need to believe in yourself and in your weapon both. Doubt is the enemy. Hesitation is potentially fatal." Sebec

The unicorns were the most recognizable magic the fairies possessed, and they sent them to those worlds where belief in the magic was in danger of falling altogether. After all there has to be some belief in magic- however small- for any world to survive.

I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.

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

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

Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations.
Their right to be free men,
Their desire to live in peace,
Their courage to seek out truth,
Herein lies the Sword of Shannara.

For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.

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.

Failure to act in a timely manner can be fatal.

We build too many walls to be honest with ourselves. -Allanon

Things change. Life changes. Nothing stays the same.

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.

You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.

Everything that exists has a counterpart. The Word is only half of the equation, Nest. The Void is the other half. The Word and the Void - one a creator, one a destroyer, one good, one evil. They're engaged in a war and they've been fighting it since the beginning of time. One seeks to maintain life's balance; the other seeks to upset it. We're all a part of that struggle because what's at risk is our own lives. The balance isn't just out there in the world around us; it's inside us as well. And the good that's the Word and the evil that's the Void is inside us, too. Inside us, each working to gain the upper hand over the other, each working to find a way to overcome the other.

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.