Quotes 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

“..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

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“He thought of these things. Harry must have changed since then, become obnoxious or something. Julian reasoned that he could not have asked the Harry he now knew to invest so much money in the business. Well, maybe the winter had something to do with it. You went to the Gibbsville Club for lunch; Harry was there. You went to the country club to play squash on Whit Hofman's private court, and Harry was around. You went to the Saturday night drinking parties, and there was Harry; inescapable, everywhere. Carter Davis was there, too, and so was Whit; so was Froggy Ogden. But they were different. The bad new never had worn off Harry Reilly. And the late fall and winter seemed now to have been spoiled by room after room with Harry Reilly. You could walk outside in the summer, but even though you can walk outside in winter, winter isn't that way. You have to go back to the room soon, and there is no life in the winter outside of rooms. Not in Gibbsville, which was a pretty small room itself.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra

“Nobody in this band was a musician when they joined up, but everybody was in some kind of trouble. Play con entusiasmo, as loudly as you can, and trust the good will and bad ear of the gringo hellraiser.”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from Against the Day

“The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce "Nurse," I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. " You have a lovely pitching arm." You had to go down on them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I'll never forgot you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”
― Denis Johnson, quote from Jesus' Son

“My Lamb, you are so very small, You have not learned to read at all; Yet never a printed book withstands The urgence of your dimpled hands. So, though this book is for yourself, Let mother keep it on the shelf Till you can read. O days that pass, That day will come too soon, alas!”
― E. Nesbit, quote from Five Children and It

“Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.”
― Richard Russo, quote from Nobody's Fool

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BookQuoters 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.

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