Top 100 Charles Martin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It was often what Charlie didn’t say that spoke the loudest.”

— Charles Martin

52. “Football is not played with strong arms and fast feet, it’s played with heart. Grow your heart and your arms and feet will follow... You play long enough and you might find yourself in a place where your arms and feet fail you... That’s when you find out what’s in your heart.”

— Charles Martin

53. “I am speaking from experience when I say that forgiveness offered – especially when so undeserved – cuts chains off the human heart that no other power in any universe anywhere can rattle much less break.”

— Charles Martin

54. “That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.” At the time.”

— Charles Martin

55. “It’s amazing what we value when we’re at our lowest.”

— Charles Martin

56. “I’m not leaving something for you. I’m leaving something in you.”

— Charles Martin

57. “All hearts have but one request. One simple, unspoken, undeniable need... To be known.”

— Charles Martin

58. “How many times had I wanted to scream the same way? To purge myself and release the pain in my soul. But somehow, I never had. Maybe those who felt free to do so were only those who didn’t posses the guilt of having put the pain there in the first place.”

— Charles Martin

59. “It’s the stuff we bury that hurts the most.”

— Charles Martin

60. “Darkness does that. It speaks fears that, left alone, remain unspoken, yet real.”

— Charles Martin

61. “I stared out the window, at the whitecapped mountains in the distance. It was strange, looking at them from the other side. A month ago I had stood in the Salt Lake City Airport and wondered what was on the other side. Now I knew. I imagine prison bars are the same way. Maybe a grave.”

— Charles Martin

62. “If you’re having trouble making a distinction between the voices in your head, let me put it this way: there are two sources of supernatural power on this earth. Jesus and satan. If what you’re hearing does not come from Jesus, then by definition, it does come from satan.”

— Charles Martin

63. “And I remember that moment, when I knew. That you’d broken loose in me the stuff that only love breaks loose.”

— Charles Martin

64. “To whom much is given, much is expected.”

— Charles Martin

65. “We stood in silence, and yet I heard a familiar voice saying, Listen here, child, that’s God’s little girl, baggage and all, so don’t go judging the cover. He doesn’t care what she looks like. He’ll take her and us any way he can get us. Just like the woman at the well. Best you switch lenses and start seeing her that way too.”

— Charles Martin

66. “When I find myself wondering what hell must be like, I’m reminded of the terminals in Atlanta. Thousands of people, most of whom don’t know one another, crammed into a limited space, all in a hurry and trying desperately to get out.”

— Charles Martin

67. “All hearts stop, Annie. What matters is what you do with it while it’s still pumping.”

— Charles Martin

68. “In the history of mankind, no single person yet has learned to swim by having the strokes explained. At some point, they dive in.”

— Charles Martin

69. “Tucker, I want to tell you a secret.” She curled my hand into a fist and showed it to me. “Life is a battle, but you can’t fight it with your fists.” She gently tapped me on the chin with my fist and then put her hand on my chest, ” You got to figt it with your heart.”

— Charles Martin

70. “Emma once told me that some people spend their whole lives trying to outrun God, maybe get someplace He’s never been. She shook her head and smiled, wondering why. Trouble is, she said, they spend a lifetime searching and running, and when they arrive, they find He’s already been there.”

— Charles Martin

71. “Water heals itself. Every time. I like that. And if I’m being honest, maybe I need that.”

— Charles Martin

72. “The mountain between us is the one mountain I cannot climb.”

— Charles Martin

73. “Child, you listen to me, and you look me straight in the eyes when I’m talking to you. I may be just old hired help, and a country woman to boot, but I’m a human. And you know what? God thought of me. He actually took the time to dream me up. I may not be much to look at, but what you see first started in the mind of God, so don’t stand there and ignore me like I don’t exist. You remember that.” Miss.”

— Charles Martin

74. “Everything in me wanted to go home. To fall on my dad, tell him about Jimmy, and tell him ‘I’m sorry.’ But there was another part of me that would not let me do that. And that part needed to make something of the mess that was me. To walk home with something more than scars and empty hands. To be something other than a failure. I was caught in the middle of that tug-of-war.”

— Charles Martin

75. “Along the bank, the cicadas tuned up, singing their singular psychedelic tune.”

— Charles Martin

76. “We all lose our way. Sometimes it just takes somebody else to find us and bring us back. Remind us.”

— Charles Martin

77. “A lot of dead writers feed my mind with their ever-present whisperings.”

— Charles Martin

78. “More than that, I liked being known, and for the first time in my life, I was known by another. I’m not saying I liked what she knew about me, not proud of the bits and pieces, but somehow she was standing inside my skin and yet I didn’t experience shame at her reflection.”

— Charles Martin

79. “But love is a difficult thing to kill. Actually, it’s the only thing in this universe or any other that you can’t kill. No weapon that has ever been made can put a dent in it. You might punch it, stab it, whip it, and hang it out to dry – you can even drive a spear through it, pierce its very heart. But all you’re going to get is blood and water, because love gives birth to love.”

— Charles Martin

80. “Pessimist, are you?” “I’m a doctor. That makes me an optimist with realistic notions.”

— Charles Martin

81. “I stood and pulled her up on two feet. “That depends.” “On what?” “Whether you’re looking at this through my eyes or yours.”

— Charles Martin

82. “Boy, you couldn’t pour pee out of a boot with instructions on the heel.”

— Charles Martin

83. “If that summer taught me anything, it was this: girls need their father. Period. And I couldn’t really tell you why other than it’s the father who tells them who they are. Until he does, they’re just floating in the earth like that tooth. Buried in some trash mound. Waiting to be discovered by somebody with a shovel who won’t crack it or crush it. Last.”

— Charles Martin

84. “You and I... we never really finished our conversation, but I can tell you this... living with a broken heart is living half dead, and that doesn’t mean you’re half alive. It means you’re half dead. And... that’s no way to live.”

— Charles Martin

85. “Music is its own dimension and it reaches people at a level that is beneath their DNA.”

— Charles Martin

86. “Sometimes you have to show people your cards to keep them in the game.”

— Charles Martin

87. “Love fills the empty places and flows from what was once the epicenter of the wound. And it’s the flowing that washes out the residue of the pain and makes us whole again. That’s the crazy miracle that is love. The more you pour out, the more you have to pour.”

— Charles Martin

88. “People in darkness don’t know they’re in darkness because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s their world. They navigate primarily by bumping off things that are stronger. Immovable. They don’t know darkness is darkness until someone turns on a light. Only then does the darkness roll back like a scroll. It has to. Darkness can’t stand light. And it hasn’t. Not since God spoke it into existence.”

— Charles Martin

89. “I’ve been hurt, I imagine we all have, and I think somewhere in that pain we convince ourselves that if we don’t open up and love again, we don’t have to hurt again.”

— Charles Martin

90. “What can’t be forgiven?’” I nodded. “It’s words. Words you can’t take back.”

— Charles Martin

91. “Thinking about life and how short it is. How we’re always just a breath away from overturned in the ditch with a fireman cutting you out with the Jaws of Life. It was just one of those moments where I knew, really knew, that life is not guaranteed. That I take it for granted. I wake up each day thinking I’ll wake up tomorrow, too. It’s not necessarily true.”

— Charles Martin

92. “You can kill my body and you’d be doing me a favor, but kill my soul and there’s no remedy for the pain. And when you’re in that place, and the pain is real bad, and you’ve been leaning into the thing causing it so long that you don’t know how to do anything other than lean, hope and hopelessness blur and you lose sight of who’s trying to hurt you and who’s trying to help. Sometimes you need somebody to stand between you and the sharp thing that hurts. To lean for you.”

— Charles Martin

93. “The mango was a mirror image of my last few days. Once beautiful, placed on display for all the world to see, it had been ripped from it’s perch, thrown to the ground, rolled in manure and squalor, and left to rot. While that might have bruised it and soiled its skin, it didn’t’ change it’s nature or what it freely offered, for once I peeled it back, an inexplicable sweetness was waiting to be discovered and tasted and consumed.”

— Charles Martin

94. “But that’s the thing about music. It doesn’t enter through the mind. It enters through the heart.”

— Charles Martin

95. “Sometimes good judgement comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgement.”

— Charles Martin

96. “Some are wrestling with painful words spoken over them by someone they love or walking around in chains of their own making.”

— Charles Martin

97. “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.”

— Charles Martin

98. “Music cuts people free.” A pause. “It silences the thing that’s trying to kill us.”

— Charles Martin

99. “You believe in things you cannot see and speak a language that only hearts know.”

— Charles Martin

100. “But if you start making money at the expense of why you do what you do, or why you were given this gift in the first place, then you need to ask yourself how badly you want that money. In the end, the cost might be more than you can pay.”

— Charles Martin