Top 50 Barbara Davis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Books are feelings,” he replied simply. “They exist to make us feel. To connect us to what’s inside, sometimes to things we don’t even know are there.”

— Barbara Davis

2. “Integrity isn’t something you have in some parts of your life and not in others. You either have it, or you don’t.”

— Barbara Davis

3. “Easier isn’t always best.”

— Barbara Davis

4. “Maybe it wasn’t about needing them. People hold on to all kinds of things, silly things, even broken things, because of the memories attached to them.”

— Barbara Davis

5. “People like to dig up the bodies, anguish over mistakes. What’s the point? The water’s poisoned. There’s no cleaning it up after it’s done. The only thing you can do is walk away – and set fire to your bridges.”

— Barbara Davis

6. “I’ve been having nightmares,” she said quietly. “Basically the same dream for months now. I’m exhausted.”

— Barbara Davis

7. “And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. ‘Do not look behind you... lest you be swept away.’ That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot’s wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday’s met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.”

— Barbara Davis

8. “She said the word never represents all the doors we keep closed, that when we say never we close ourselves off from the hope that things can ever be different.”

— Barbara Davis

9. “No,” Missy said firmly. “It isn’t. It’s all the doors we keep shut. It’s the places we won’t let ourselves go, the things we won’t let ourselves have or be, because we don’t think we’re good enough or strong enough for more. I know because that used to be me. And then I became a single parent, and I realized I didn’t have time for nevers.” She paused, her smile thin and tremulous. “All I’m saying is don’t live a smaller life than you deserve.”

— Barbara Davis

10. “There was certainly plenty in her own past that she was reluctant to look at. Because looking made it real.”

— Barbara Davis

11. “We read not to escape life but to learn how to live it more deeply and richly, to experience the world through the eyes of the other.”

— Barbara Davis

12. “At ten, she learned that no address was permanent, at twelve, that no promise was sacred, and at sixteen, that there was no such thing as safe.”

— Barbara Davis

13. “I’ve never been good at letting people in, but somehow you’re here, and I’m glad.”

— Barbara Davis

14. “Family isn’t always about blood. Sometimes you just recognize someone. That’s how it was with your gran and me. We were kin. A special kind of kin.”

— Barbara Davis

15. “It’s easier to be prickly than to be vulnerable, to distract with harsh words rather than show our bruises. But we must do the hard things. That is the work of healing.”

— Barbara Davis

16. “Bees are like people, little girl. They attack when they feel threatened – when they’re afraid. It’s the same for us. It’s always the things we fear that sting us in the end. The things we hide from or push against. When we drop the fear – the resistance – things take their course in a more natural and painless way.”

— Barbara Davis

17. “I think I could sit here all night looking out over this lake. It’s so peaceful, like a church without walls.”

— Barbara Davis

18. “There is a grief worse than death. It is the grief of a life half-lived.”

— Barbara Davis

19. “No sacred ritual or initiation is required to become what we already are – bits of god and stardust held together by divine breath and pure love.”

— Barbara Davis

20. “The number of lives we are capable of living is limited only by the number of books we choose to read.”

— Barbara Davis

21. “Every woman is a puzzle,” I say finally. “Some harder to solve than others. But then, I’ve found it’s the difficult ones who are most worth the effort.”

— Barbara Davis

22. “There’s nothing more personal than a book, especially one that’s become an important part of someone’s life.”

— Barbara Davis

23. “The truth is I can be rather childlike at times. Sullen and immovable. And yes, difficult. I suppose that’s what comes from a life that’s denied you everything you ever wanted.”

— Barbara Davis

24. “Books were safe. They had plots that followed predictable patterns, beginnings, middles, and endings. Usually happy, though not always. But if something tragic happened in a book, you could just close it and choose a new one, unlike real life, where events often played out without the protagonist’s consent.”

— Barbara Davis

25. “I’m not cut out for happy. Busy is going to have to do.”

— Barbara Davis

26. “Love – even love that cannot be returned – is never cause for regret.”

— Barbara Davis

27. “She wanted to go back, to clean it all up, to rewrite her story without all the dark parts, to unknow the things she knew, to unsee the things she’d seen, to live without her memories, her shame, her regret. And maybe that was a kind of atonement, after all. But none of those things were possible.”

— Barbara Davis

28. “When so much has been uprooted – so many things lost – one must seek comfort in rituals. Even the sad ones.”

— Barbara Davis

29. “No, my girl. No one begins this way. It’s a place you arrive at, a bottom you sink to when life pushes you under one too many times. You paddle toward the light for a while, because you want to believe you can save yourself. But then one day you see it all true, and you simply let go. You stop fighting.”

— Barbara Davis

30. “Life gives us exactly what we need, even what we want, but we’re afraid to grab it and hold on with both hands. We let go when the holding gets hard. We blame when we should forgive.” She paused for the tiniest beat, locking eyes with her son. “And we run when we should stand our ground. Because we don’t understand that we don’t just get the life we wish for. We get the life we fight for.”

— Barbara Davis

31. “Time, you see, is the enemy, a trap of our own making. The past is lost forever, a wasteland of all that could have been and never was, while the future stretches endlessly before us, always an hourglass’s worth of sand beyond our reach. Today, then, is what we have left – the here and the now – to make our wishes, and to fight for the life we want.”

— Barbara Davis

32. “Without faith, even our work is doomed to fail. Faith is everything.”

— Barbara Davis

33. “Without a reader, a book was a blank slate, an object with no breath or pulse of its own. But once a book became part of someone’s world, it came to life, with a past and a present – and, if properly cared for, a future.”

— Barbara Davis

34. “I drop into my chair, breathe in, let it out. Even now, with so many years gone, the memories are tricky. Like the ache of a phantom limb, the source of the pain may be gone, but the reminder of what’s been lost, so sudden and so keen, takes me unaware. I sit with that pain a moment, waiting for it to fade. Afternoon.”

— Barbara Davis

35. “Alas, we women seldom get the life we would choose for ourselves. Instead, our lot is chosen for us, by those who claim to know best, and before we know it, we’ve been shaped into someone we don’t recognize, remade in someone else’s image.”

— Barbara Davis

36. “And I don’t think you’re helpless. But it’s okay to let someone help you once in a while.”

— Barbara Davis

37. “We never think of our parents that way, as people with dreams and passions. They’re just parents.”

— Barbara Davis

38. “I’ve lived a good many years, and seen a good many things, and one thing I know to be true is that we are all scarred, all broken in our own way. Some of us may break more quietly than others, but break we all do, when this world dishes out its worst.”

— Barbara Davis

39. “She had learned only recently the power of forgiveness, and had come to understand that the choice to forgive was as much about self-healing as about absolving another of their guilt.”

— Barbara Davis

40. “Like people, it is the books with the most scars that have lived the fullest lies. Faded, creased, dusty, broken. These have the best stories to tell, the wisest counsel to offer.”

— Barbara Davis

41. “Her eyes were open and glazed, a piercing shade of violet with fixed, bottomless pupils.”

— Barbara Davis

42. “We need no church, no graven image, no rules scratched on stone tablets or ancient scrolls. No sacred ritual or initiation is required to become what we already are – bits of god and stardust held together by divine breath and pure love.”

— Barbara Davis

43. “If someone, somewhere, was interested in a subject, no matter how obscure, there was a book about it. And if there was a book about it, someone, somewhere, wanted to read it. Her job was to connect the two, and it was one she took very seriously. She’d.”

— Barbara Davis

44. “That’s why the worst truths – the ones that do the most harm – are those we refuse to face.”

— Barbara Davis

45. “Bridges can be built across the widest chasms, even when all we have to build with are broken pieces. “It’s time to stop punishing.”

— Barbara Davis

46. “Money has a way of sparing the haves the kinds of trials the have-nots grapple with on a daily basis.”

— Barbara Davis

47. “We plan our lives like we’re in charge, lay all the pieces end to end like we think they should go, and then zing! Something happens we never saw coming, and we end up somewhere else. Sometimes it’s right back where we started.”

— Barbara Davis

48. “But if something tragic happened in a book, you could just close it and choose a new one, unlike real life, where events often played out without the protagonist’s consent.”

— Barbara Davis

49. “We do need to go home from time to time, but only to remind us why we left in the first place, so we can get clear on what we do want.”

— Barbara Davis

50. “Books may be likened to the people who come into our lives. Some will become precious to us; others will be set aside. The key is to discern which is which.”

— Barbara Davis