Top 40 Brian Doyle Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.”

— Brian Doyle

2. “But you cannot control everything... All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference... You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow... That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.”

— Brian Doyle

3. “But simple as the Sign of the Cross is, it carries a brave weight: it names the Trinity, celebrates the Creator, and brings home all the power of faith to the brush of fingers on skin and bone and belly. So do we, sometimes well and sometimes ill, labor to bring home our belief in God’s love to the stuff of our daily lives, the skin and bone of this world – and the Sign of the Cross helps us to remember that we have a Companion on the road.”

— Brian Doyle

4. “We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.”

— Brian Doyle

5. “Is this why we write and read, in the end, in order to find new words for the things we feel but do not have words for?”

— Brian Doyle

6. “You cannot edit your life, and even if I was today offered the chance to never meet her, and so not leave the city I loved, I would decline, for life is a verb, life swerves and lurches no matter how cautious and careful your driving, and I would not be who I am, surrounded by those I love most in this world, had I not left Chicago when I did.”

— Brian Doyle

7. “I am no heroic figure, but a man like any other, capable of selfish and selfless at once, of light and dark, courage and cravenness; all men are two men, always at war with each other, isn’t that so? We don masks, we perform parts, we adopt personas, but we are never one sort of man, and not another. Even the greatest among us knows this to be so; perhaps the wisest among us are those who admit it most easily.”

— Brian Doyle

8. “Well the sky always seemed like another ocean to me, you know? Like we live between two incredible oceans, and we’ll never get to the bottom of either of them.”

— Brian Doyle

9. “Maturity turns out to be a question you can never answer with confidence, despite advanced age and wage.”

— Brian Doyle

10. “What is Chicagoness? What is the city made of? Why is it different from any other city? What are the things that are here and only here and compose the here of here? He leaned back in his lawn chair and thought a bit and then he said, “The prevalence of the lake. The way the lake is a sea and not a lake. The way the lake shoulders the city. The cutting of wind off the lake and the whirl of snow.”

— Brian Doyle

11. “But if we do not dream, then I think perhaps we are misusing our heads. They are not on our shoulders only to be farms for hair.”

— Brian Doyle

12. “But never, among all the cities I have wandered over the years, cities all over the earth, did I feel and smell and sense anything quite like the verb that is Chicago; and always, no matter how many years passed, I could hear and see and touch something inside me that only Chicago has and is, some intricate combination of flat sharp light off the lake grappling with dense light from the plains to the west, the fields to the south, the forests to the north.”

— Brian Doyle

13. “We sit on park benches and beaches and couches and hilltops, listening and dreaming seemingly to no particular purpose. But isn’t it often the case that when we cease to move and think, we see and hear and understand a great deal?”

— Brian Doyle

14. “Your library is where the community stores its treasures. It’s the house that imagination built. It’s where all the stories that matter are gathered together and celebrated and shared... People come to it communally for something that’s deep and ancient and important beyond an easy explanation. Who you are as a town is in the library. It’s why when you want to destroy a place you burn down the library. People who fear freedom fear libraries.”

— Brian Doyle

15. “Some things sing and some are mute.”

— Brian Doyle

16. “On a clear day the Oregon coast is the most beautiful place on earth – clear and crisp and clean, a rich green in the land and a bright blue in the sky, the air fat and salty and bracing, the ocean spreading like a grin. Brown pelicans rise and fall in their chorus lines in the wells of the waves, cormorants arrow, an eagle kingly queenly floats south high above the water line.”

— Brian Doyle

17. “She’ll be a fierce woman, that one. It’ll take a hell of a man to love her right. Be like living with a thunderstorm. Same as her mother. A fierce woman. Force of nature. The kind of woman you just hand on for the ride. The most exciting and the most heartbreaking woman you could ever meet. They don’t know their own minds most of the time, but their hearts are so damn big it hurts em inside.”

— Brian Doyle

18. “For a moment this day, for many moments this May, let us gape in awe at the strength of women, and look upon their sinewy courage with respect and humility, as the Lord looked on His Mother, and still does. Like Him we are of women born, and to women must pay our first respect, and owe our first love, for they are as strong as the very ribs of the earth.”

— Brian Doyle

19. “Most of a place is not what human beings think. Maybe we will be better human beings when we begin to see all the other things a place is besides all the things we think it is or wanted it to be.”

— Brian Doyle

20. “Somehow she lost her compass. Her engine failed. Her gyroscope broke. She’s... lost. She says the road she was on isn’t there any more and she doesn’t know where to walk now.”

— Brian Doyle

21. “So very many silences, and kinds of silence: chapels and churches and confessionals, glades and gorges, pregnant pauses and searing lovemaking; the stifling stifled brooding silence just before a thunderstorm unleashes itself wild on the world; the silence of space, the vast of vista; the crucial silences between notes, without which there could be no music;.”

— Brian Doyle

22. “Everyone thinks that the old days were better, or that they were harder, and the modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people’s hearts have always been the same, happy and sad, and that hasn’t changed at all. It’s just the shapes of lives that change, not the lives themselves.”

— Brian Doyle

23. “There are stories in the air as thick as birds around me, he would say. I will save those stories from starving he would say. I have a great hunger for stories, he would say.”

— Brian Doyle

24. “Rained gently last night, just enough to wash the town clean, and then today a clean crisp fat spring day, the air redolent, the kind of green minty succulent air you’d bottle if you could and snort greedily on bleak, wet January evenings when the streetlights hzzzt on at four in the afternoon and all existence seems hopeless and sad.”

— Brian Doyle

25. “Simple, powerful, poignant, the Sign of the Cross is a mnemonic device like the Mass, in which we sit down to table with one another and remember the Last Supper, or a baptism, where we remember John the Baptist’s brawny arm pouring some of the Jordan River over Christ. So we remember the central miracle and paradox of the faith that binds us each to each: that we believe, against all evidence and sense, in life and love and light, in the victory of those things over death and evil and darkness.”

— Brian Doyle

26. “I am a puzzle and a conundrum and a thunderstorm.”

— Brian Doyle

27. “Life is a verb, life swerves and lurches no matter how cautious and careful your driving.”

— Brian Doyle

28. “There are some silences that are so huge, and fraught, and haunted, and weighed, and shocked, that they just are; there’s nothing you can say about them that makes any sense. All you can do is witness them, and feel some deep ache that such things arrive, and must be endured, with wordless aching all around.”

— Brian Doyle

29. “It’s wrong to say that animals do not feel what we feel; indeed, they may feel far more than we do and in far different emotional shades.”

— Brian Doyle

30. “Laughter’s wicked holy.”

— Brian Doyle

31. “If everything must be burned I will do the burning and so I will not be burnt but be the fire. Everything I ever loved burned and so I will be the burning. There is nothing but that must which be burnt. Women will burn and children burn and houses burn so I will be nothing that can burn. I will be the fire. The fire has no home. The fire goes where it wants. The fire arrives and departs and none can account the meaning of its travels. Everything I ever touched burned.”

— Brian Doyle

32. “Maybe, thinking about it now, we were trying to figure out how to make love in such a way as to make time not matter at all, or defeat it for awhile. Which we did for awhile.”

— Brian Doyle

33. “Better to sail alone, and let the battered vessel wander where it will. The only honest course. Assume nothing, trust no one, encumber not and be not encumbered, make your own way, steer your own ship and none other, exactly so.”

— Brian Doyle

34. “We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that’s us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding.”

— Brian Doyle

35. “People make too much of facts. Also people make too much of gut feelings. Gut feelings probably mean food poisoning.”

— Brian Doyle

36. “I am a guy who wanders around looking for nothing in particular, which is to say everything.”

— Brian Doyle

37. “Some women have a pulsing energy almost too sharp and salty to endure and when they are in pain their pain is ferocious and shatters all over the place.”

— Brian Doyle

38. “Don’t know what to do in a world without mud and moss, brother.”

— Brian Doyle

39. “Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.”

— Brian Doyle

40. “List any ten speeds for time: summer morning, winter dusk, boring lecture, first time making love with woman you actually really love, drunkenness, moment of death, car crash, heart attack, any and all meetings of more than seven people, childhood, and not one happens at the same speed as the others, some are blindingly fast and over instantly and others drone and moan on until you contemplate removing your spleen with a pepper shaker just for entertainment’s sake.”

— Brian Doyle

41. “But I believe it is an error to wonder about what you do not know, at the expense of savoring the excellence of what you do know.”

— Brian Doyle

42. “Brooding weather all day, then a furious downpour, then brilliant late afternoon sun, the air crisp and clean and everything dripping happily, all creatures emerged blinking and capering, the sky crammed with wheeling swifts, you could see for miles, the air so freshly washed that your lungs grinned. You know what I mean.”

— Brian Doyle

43. “How very many scatters of stars are named for animals, thinks Miss Moss. Eagle, swan, crab, bull, bear, fish, lion, goat, scorpion, horse. We see animals everywhere. We are animals. Or we used to be animals, and mostly now we forget how to be animals, which is why we look for them everywhere.”

— Brian Doyle