Top 40 Aidan Chambers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.”

— Aidan Chambers

2. “The most memorable people in life will be the friends who loved you when you weren’t very lovable.”

— Aidan Chambers

3. “You have to know your own truth and stick to it. And never despair. Never give up. There’s always hope.”

— Aidan Chambers

4. “Readers are made by readers – it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.”

— Aidan Chambers

5. “Self pity is a disease which does not kill but corrodes.”

— Aidan Chambers

6. “Sometimes the course of our lives depends on what we do or don’t do in a few seconds, a heartbeat, when we either seize the opportunity, or just miss it. Miss the moment and you never get a chance again.”

— Aidan Chambers

7. “I thought how lovely and how strange a river is...”

— Aidan Chambers

8. “When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.”

— Aidan Chambers

9. “Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?”

— Aidan Chambers

10. “However much you love somebody, you should always keep a part of yourself to yourself. Never give it all. You can never be yourself otherwise.”

— Aidan Chambers

11. “There are times when you don’t know yourself. There are times when you don’t want to know yourself. There are times when you want to be what you have never allowed yourself to be before.”

— Aidan Chambers

12. “The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself.”

— Aidan Chambers

13. “I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page – sometimes every word as well.”

— Aidan Chambers

14. “Rooms are a fixed size, which can’t be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones. They should be unchanging in shape and proportions. But sometimes they do change depending on who’s in them.”

— Aidan Chambers

15. “We resent being faced with facts we’d prefer to ignore as much as being wrongly accused of doing something we haven’t.”

— Aidan Chambers

16. “And trust dies from ifs and buts.”

— Aidan Chambers

17. “It’s like a sleepover, when you feel you can say all kinds of things, because the darkness hides your blushes.”

— Aidan Chambers

18. “And when someone else speaks your name you feel pleased. You feel wanted. You feel there. Alive. Even if they’re saying your name with dislike, at least you know you’re you, that you exist.”

— Aidan Chambers

19. “He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.”

— Aidan Chambers

20. “You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.”

— Aidan Chambers

Featured in: Reading Quotes

21. “Doing anything when you’re bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored ismooning about and doing nothing.”

— Aidan Chambers

22. “Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.”

— Aidan Chambers

23. “Love, being in love, isn’t a constant thing. It doesn’t always flow at the same strength. It’s not always like a river in flood. It’s more like the sea. It has tides, it ebbs and flows. The thing is, when love is real, whether it’s ebbing or flowing, it’s always there, it never goes away. And that’s the only proof you can have that it is real, and not just a crush or an infatuation or a passing fancy.”

— Aidan Chambers

24. “If a boy, if a man, asks you if you’re all right and you say yes, he’ll always believe you and get on with what he wants to do. It’s just the way they’re made.”

— Aidan Chambers

25. “I will not compromise on language or content. At 15, people can handle the same language as me, they’re just as complicated as me and are very interested in thinking about important questions for the first time.”

— Aidan Chambers

26. “You get to be wiser by storying the world and seeing it through other forms of consciousness than your own.”

— Aidan Chambers

27. “I cannot live without reading.”

— Aidan Chambers

Featured in: Reading Quotes

28. “Yet, isn’t it strange, isn’t it weird, how we can KNOW that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is! How clever the human mind is, that it can accept two contradictory things as ‘facts.’ Yes, I know that in this case one ‘fact’ was untrue. But the human mind can KNOW something is untrue and still accept it as a ‘fact,’ and act on it as if it were true.”

— Aidan Chambers

29. “I am without any doubt whatever a NON-actor. For a start, the gushing pretension of would-be actors puts me off. Ergo ego. I watch them preening in front of the rehearsal mirrors in the drama hall. Just waiting for applause. All they want is to be liked. Plus admired, adored, idolized, flattered, etc. And they’re more like groupy than glue. If they’re on their own for more than five minutes they get withdrawal symptoms and go walkabout, looking for kindred lost souls to coagulate with.”

— Aidan Chambers

30. “And the price for being a homo-hater should be as high as anyone can pay.”

— Aidan Chambers

31. “Belief means willing yourself to give all your attention to living with loving gladness in the world you think really exists.”

— Aidan Chambers

32. “Maybe we should always start everything from the inside and work to the outside, and not from the outside to the inside. What d’you think?”

— Aidan Chambers

33. “And in short measures life may perfect be.”

— Aidan Chambers

34. “Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it. I don’t write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.”

— Aidan Chambers

35. “Don’t be his story. Don’t be anyone else’s story. Be your own story. Protect yourself.”

— Aidan Chambers

36. “If we try to measure Now, we find it’s always gone, has become part of the past.”

— Aidan Chambers

37. “The plain unwelcome fact is that sometimes life stymies you.”

— Aidan Chambers

38. “Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being.” She cleared her throat again. “Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.”

— Aidan Chambers

39. “Karl was no glamour boy. But even during this first meeting I discovered he had something better. The kind of intelligence that’s more attractive than physical beauty.”

— Aidan Chambers

40. “Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people’s books, one’s own books – it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction.”

— Aidan Chambers

41. “I don’t actually think “true love” is such a good term because love can only be true. If it isn’t true it can’t be love.”

— Aidan Chambers

Featured in: Romance Quotes

42. “Unless you find yourself in a book, you have a hard time finding anybody else.”

— Aidan Chambers

43. “At the end of things we turn into historians. Sometimes happy, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes regretful or bitter, sometimes to reassure ourselves that we have amounted to something, however small. And sometimes, as I am doing now, to try with the wisdom of hindsight to make sense of ourselves.”

— Aidan Chambers