Top 40 Cynthia Voigt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You could say that all of life is a series of last chances.”

— Cynthia Voigt

2. “I love teaching; I love little kids.”

— Cynthia Voigt

3. “You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?”

— Cynthia Voigt

4. “I got to thinking – when it was too late – you have to reach out to people. To your family, too. You can’t just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough. If you don’t care enough, you forget about them, if you can.”

— Cynthia Voigt

5. “She couldn’t get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn’t get away.”

— Cynthia Voigt

6. “Rebellion is necessary for development of character.”

— Cynthia Voigt

7. “Hiding under the bed doesn’t make the worry stop.”

— Cynthia Voigt

8. “Dicey looked out over the tall marsh grasses, blowing in the wind. If the wind blew, the grasses had to bend with it.”

— Cynthia Voigt

9. “Behind the mask Jackaroo wore, there could be a face of bone, its flesh long since eaten away. Jackaroo could fight as a trained soldier, with swords and shield; he could ride a horse like a Lord; and he had the knowledge of letters which only the Lords held.”

— Cynthia Voigt

10. “I have the feeling that I know who I am, only I’m not anymore.”

— Cynthia Voigt

11. “Kids are really tougher than adults, but we tend to forget this in an affluent society that lets kids indulge themselves.”

— Cynthia Voigt

12. “I didnt write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.”

— Cynthia Voigt

13. “He held the whip that and made those marks, and drawn that blood, and he was ashamed. He held the whip that could make more marks on the flesh of Nikol’s back. While Nikol begged.”

— Cynthia Voigt

14. “When a daring idea first crosses one’s mind, if it is to be realized in the future it is often appealing. Then, as the time for its execution comes nearer, one begins to dread that which had once been anticipated.”

— Cynthia Voigt

15. “Oriel didn’t move. But inside of his head, all was movement, like a river running over rapids, searching for the way through, trying routes around rocks and over shallows, a turbulence of thought more rapid than he could follow. Griff, he knew, would do and say nothing until he heard Oriel’s choice.”

— Cynthia Voigt

16. “I do have trouble starting books. I have ideas that I have trouble starting to write. But I’m the kind of person who tends to finish everything she starts out of sheer stubbornness.”

— Cynthia Voigt

17. “He felt – washed clean, healed. He felt if he could just live here he would be all right. He felt as if he had never been alive before. He felt at ease with himself and as if he had come home to a place where he could be himself, without hiding anything, without pretending even to himself. He felt, thinking his way back up the beach, as if his brain had just woken up from some long sleep, and it wanted to run along beside the waves, to see how far and fast it could go.”

— Cynthia Voigt

18. “By the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, I moved to New York City and worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.”

— Cynthia Voigt

19. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs... They thought that just because they were smashing eggs they must be making an omelette.”

— Cynthia Voigt

20. “Evil would be done, that was the nature of the world; that was bearable if good could also be done.”

— Cynthia Voigt

21. “He knew from the first that this man would know how to hurt him.”

— Cynthia Voigt

22. “Where the veil broke, you could see silvery clouds on which tall angels might stand. Not cute little Christmas angels, but high, stern angels in white robes, whose faces were sad and serious from being near God all day and hearing His decisions about the world.”

— Cynthia Voigt

23. “Why doesn’t momma come back?”

— Cynthia Voigt

24. “The worst things weren’t outside of you.”

— Cynthia Voigt

25. “I was no scholar in college, and was arrogant about what I thought.”

— Cynthia Voigt

26. “You should have spoken up sooner.” her grandmother answered. “No need to bear pain unless you have to.”

— Cynthia Voigt

27. “All I wanted to do was read, to be told stories. Stories were full of excitement and emotions and characters that entertained and often inspired.”

— Cynthia Voigt

28. “All she knew was that his smile lit up the morning as the rising sun does. For a moment, looking at his face, it was as if her ribs were empty, hollow, as if the world had stopped forever while she looked into his eyes as blue as the bellflowers that grew wild across the meadows. For a moment, just until her beating heart had returned to her chest, Birle had thought she understood everything about herself she had never understood before.”

— Cynthia Voigt

29. “To himself, he called it a safe place, and when they were finally settled in at the end of July, living in the three-room house where windows gave out over the water and woods and sky, he knew he had been right.”

— Cynthia Voigt

30. “She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.”

— Cynthia Voigt

31. “Dicey felt a great weight settle on her shoulders. She tried to shrug it off, but it wouldn’t move.”

— Cynthia Voigt

32. “Once again, everything had changed on them. Perhaps it was all this changing that made her sad.”

— Cynthia Voigt

33. “When Jeff Greene was in second grade, seven and a half years old, he got home from school one Tuesday afternoon in early March, and found a note from his mother, saying that she had gone away and would not be coming back.”

— Cynthia Voigt

34. “There could be no home for the Tillermans. Home free – Dicey would settle for a place to stay. Stay free.”

— Cynthia Voigt

35. “She stood to drink in the darkness and the air fallen still after a snowfall. The clouds had all blown away. Faint moonlight silvered the fresh snow. Stars shone in a black sky, like jewels on a Lady’s cloak. The garden lay shrouded in silver white silence, all its roughness made smooth. Such snow, Gwyn thought, had a way of turning the world into what it was not and making it seem safe. Such snow masked the true face of the world.”

— Cynthia Voigt

36. “Having someplace in mind that you were traveling to was different from not having any place.”

— Cynthia Voigt

37. “Little bright-topped waves rocked the boat gently on the way to pattering up against the seawalls. A salty wind blew from the land out over the water. The town of Crisfield lay in the sunlight before them, bleached white as the oyster shells scattered around the ground.”

— Cynthia Voigt

38. “He was studying his grandmother, as if he was hungry too, but for something not food, hungry in a way that food could never fill.”

— Cynthia Voigt

39. “He took his time getting to her, as if he was sure she’d wait, sure of his own strength to hold her, even at that distance. He moved like he thought she was afraid of him, too afraid to run.”

— Cynthia Voigt

40. “Throughout the meal, Windy’s voice blew over them, smooth and steady. It didn’t matter what he was saying.”

— Cynthia Voigt

41. “It all depended on what their grandmother was really like, inside herself where she was who she really was. Not outside. Dicey knew about the difference between outside and inside.”

— Cynthia Voigt