“But life, if nothing else, had taught her promises weren't always to be counted on, and what appeared at first a shining chance might end in bitter disappointment.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“..the fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes...and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“Men who watch, and say little, very often are much wiser than the men they serve.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“So, you see, my heart is held forever by this place," she said. "I cannot leave.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant, and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“Ye'll never best your fears until ye face them”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“I do promise that you will survive this. Faith, my own heart is so scattered round the country now, I marvel that it has the strength each day to keep me standing. But it does,' she said, and drawing in a steady breath she pulled back just enough to raise a hand to wipe Sophia's tears. 'It does. And so will yours.'
'How can you be so sure?'
'Because it is a heart, and knows no better.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“Hope rarely enters into it. 'Tis action moves the world.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“Tis action moves the world....[in] the game of chess, mind that: ye cannot leave your men to stand unmoving on the board and hope to win. A soldier must first step upon the battlefield if does mean to cross it.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“...a man with eyes the color of the winter sea.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“A grieving person's like a person treading in deep water--if they've nothing to hold on to, they lose hope. They slide right under.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“The man they'd come to see was up and standing at the window with his back to them, so that only Sophia saw his squared stance and his shoulders and the brown hair fastened back above the collar of his shirt. He wore no coat, just breeks and boots, and in the fine white shirt he stood there pale and like a ghost, the only thing of light in that dull room.
He spoke again, not looking round, his voice grown hoarser from the illness. 'Did you ye see her? Was she well?'
'She will be now,' the colnel gently said...
Sophia could not move from where she stood. Could not believe it.
Then he turned, a ghost no longer, but a breathing man. A living man, whose shadowed eyes grew brighter in the grip of hard emotion as he left the window and in two strides crossed to fold her in his arms...”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“I told ye I'd come back to ye.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“Whatever might become of them, she knew that there was nothing that could rob them of that happiness. For they had lived their winter, and the spring had finally come.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“No matter what the bards may say, there’s no romance in dying for a man.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“It's hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who've been dead three hundred years. They can't come back and tell us, can they?”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“David McClelland was changed by that day more than most men.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“For if there was no winter, we could never hope for spring.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“Let the devil bar my way, I will come back to ye.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“Watching, I could feel again the stirrings of my characters—the faint, as yet inaudible, suggestion of their voices, and their movements close around me, in the way someone can sense another’s presence in a darkened room. I didn’t need to shut my eyes. They were already fixed, not truly seeing, on the window glass, in that strange writer’s trance that stole upon me when my characters began to speak, and I tried hard to listen.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“Some men prayed for life and some for death, in languages as varied as their uniforms—the Dutch and Germans and the Scots and French and English tangled side by side, for all men looked alike when they were dying.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“It winna dee ye ony good, it disna ring. The salt fae the sea ruins the wiring, fast as I fix it. Besides,’ said the man, as he came up to join us, ‘I’m nae in the hoose tae be hearin ye, am I?”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“She’d looked at herself with a sigh, having hoped her reflection would show something more than the road-weary waif who sighed back at her, bright curls disheveled and darkened by dust, pale eyes reddened and circled by shadows of sleeplessness.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“But life, if nothing else, had taught her promises weren’t always to be counted on, and what appeared at first a shining chance might end in bitter disappointment.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“Where’e’er I go, my Soul shall stay with thee: ’Tis but my Shadow that I take away;”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“hard-scraping tools, with his sharp-featured face and the mirthless dark eyes that seemed always, whenever”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
“He was drifting, I could hear it in his voice. He always fell asleep as easily as some great lazing cat, he only had to close his eyes and moments later he’d be gone, while my own mind kept on whirring round with scattered thoughts and images.”
― Susanna Kearsley, quote from The Winter Sea
Susanna Kearsley
Born place: Brantford, Ontario, Canada
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“a cupboard, but there seemed to be … stairs? Ivy had brought a candle stub, which she lit with a”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Whispers in the Walls
“That’s a drummer’s love story. If you want a prettier one, you’ll be waiting forever. If you could separate your body into four distinct rhythms, you’d be cracked too”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, quote from 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas
“There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! ‘What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes... Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition... And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree—and all goes well.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Stories
“In fact, in the 1990s an adviser to the mayor of Tehran suggested that they add Prozac to Tehran’s water to revitalize the citizens.”
― Maziar Bahari, quote from Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival
“I thought loving someone meant letting go, but by the time I learned that loving someone means fighting for them too, it was too late.”
― Renee Carlino, quote from Swear on This Life
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A Game of Thrones: T...
The Buried Giant
Year ZeroBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
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