Top 40 Eowyn Ivey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That’s where the adventure is. Not knowing where you’ll end up or how you’ll fare. It’s all a mystery, and when we say any different, we’re just lying to ourselves. Tell me, when have you felt most alive?”

— Eowyn Ivey

2. “She looked directly up into the northern lights and she wondered if those cold-burning spectres might not draw her breath, her very soul, out of her chest and into the stars.”

— Eowyn Ivey

3. “The leaden sky seemed to hold its breath.”

— Eowyn Ivey

4. “The December days had a certain luminosity and sparkle, like frost on bare branches, alight in the morning just before it melts. Mabel.”

— Eowyn Ivey

5. “Carry me on and on to the edge of the earth, with children’s laughter like a wind – full sail, then carry me beyond.”

— Eowyn Ivey

6. “To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as your were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.”

— Eowyn Ivey

7. “Everywhere, even in the blackest abyss, he believed one might witness the divine. The shadows and contrast – absence itself – as important as the light and marble, for one cannot exist without the other.”

— Eowyn Ivey

8. “Yet what of love? That is another, more solid thing; it is not tricked by fine lights or spirits. It is more of earth and time, like a river-turned stone.”

— Eowyn Ivey

9. “The days diminished. Light lasted just six hours, and it was a feeble light. Mabel organized her hours into patterns – wash, mend, cook, wash, mend, cook – and tried not to imagine floating beneath the ice like a yellow leaf.”

— Eowyn Ivey

10. “She told no one of the otter. Garrett would want to trap it; Faina would ask her to draw it. She refused to confine it by any means because, in some strange way, she knew it was her heart. Living, twisting muscle beneath bristly damp fur. Breaking through thin ice, splashing in cold creek water, sliding belly-down across snow. Joyful, though it should have known better.”

— Eowyn Ivey

11. “She seemed to him both powerful and delicate, like a wild thing that thrives in its place but withers when stolen away.”

— Eowyn Ivey

12. “November was here, and it frightened her because she knew what it brought – cold upon the valley like a coming death, glacial wind through the cracks between the cabin logs. But most of all, darkness. Darkness so complete.”

— Eowyn Ivey

13. “We say we worship. A word. A man-god. A fiery mountain. But we worship only ourselves. And we are jealous gods.”

— Eowyn Ivey

14. “It was the kind of snow that brought children running out their doors, made them turn their faces skyward, and spin in circles with their arms outstretched.”

— Eowyn Ivey

15. “Ah, and this is the trouble with a diary. We are allowed to stand too long before its mirror and gaze at ourselves, where we unavoidably find vanity and fault.”

— Eowyn Ivey

16. “There are so many other labels people like to assign. Where am I an insider, and where am I an outsider? It all depends on where I’m standing and who is trying to put me into which box.”

— Eowyn Ivey

17. “It’s humanity. We’re complicated and messy and beautiful.”

— Eowyn Ivey

18. “I think if I ever tell it to my grandchildren, I will change the ending and have everyone live happily ever after. We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?”

— Eowyn Ivey

19. “As the glow of the cabin windows turned to flickers through the trees and then to black, her eyes adjusted and the starlight alone on the pure white snow was enough to light her way.”

— Eowyn Ivey

20. “If she couldn’t convince anyone else, how could she go on believing?”

— Eowyn Ivey

21. “She cooked and cleaned, and cooked and cleaned, and found herself further consumed by the gray, until even her vision was muted and the world around her drained of color.”

— Eowyn Ivey

22. “It is remarkable how we go on. All that we come to know and witness and endure, yet our hearts keep beating, our faith persists.”

— Eowyn Ivey

23. “We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?”

— Eowyn Ivey

24. “Now he sat laughing with strangers, when he hadn’t smiled at her in years.”

— Eowyn Ivey

25. “There’s been a lot to get used to here.” Esther laughed. “Isn’t that the truth. I don’t know if you ever get used to it really. It just gets in your blood so that you can’t stand to be anywhere else.”

— Eowyn Ivey

26. “I would believe again if I could. In goodness. In magnificence. In simple benevolence. Yet even in these far and icy valleys, mankind is no different, just more poorly armed. Strip away psychrometer and sextant, carbines and glass plates, skin shifts and quills and painted faces, and we are the same. Quivering maws. Gluttonous. Covetous. Fearful. We say we worship. A word. A man-god. A fiery mountain. But we worship only ourselves. And we are jealous gods.”

— Eowyn Ivey

27. “No. Sometimes these things happen. Life doesn’t go the way we plan or hope, but we don’t have to be so angry, do we?”

— Eowyn Ivey

28. “It takes a kind of arrogance to think everything in the world can be measured and weighed with our scientific instruments.”

— Eowyn Ivey

29. “Mabel was no longer sure of the child’s age. She seemed both newly born and as old as the mountains, her eyes animated with unspoken thoughts, her face impassive. Here with the child in the trees, all things seemed possible and true.”

— Eowyn Ivey

30. “That is excitement. We catch only glimpses, a burst of movement, a flap of wings, yet it is life itself beating at shadow’s edge. It is the unfolding of potential; all of what we might experience and see and learn awaits us.”

— Eowyn Ivey

31. “The exact science of one molecule transformed into another – that Mabel could not explain, but then again she couldn’t explain how a fetus formed in the womb, cells becoming beating heart and hoping soul. She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable?”

— Eowyn Ivey

32. “She’d say the girl needed warmth and affection and someone to look after her, but Jack had to wonder if that didn’t have more to do with a woman’s own desires than the needs of a child.”

— Eowyn Ivey

33. “I have only ever been truly frightened of boredom and loneliness,” she says. It.”

— Eowyn Ivey

34. “When we are young, we consume the world in great gulps, and it consumes us, and everything is mysterious and alive and fills us with desire and wonder, fear and guilt.”

— Eowyn Ivey

35. “And yet, what Ada had written about joy was entirely true. When she stands before you with her long, naked limbs and her mysterious smile, you must embrace her while you can.”

— Eowyn Ivey

36. “There is a mythical element to our childhood, it seems, that stays with us always. When we are young, we consume the world in great gulps, and it consumes us, and everything is mysterious and alive and fills us with desire and wonder, fear, and guilt. With the passing of the years, however, those memories become distant and malleable, and we shape them into the stories of who we are. We are brave, or we are cowardly. We are loving, or we are cruel.”

— Eowyn Ivey

37. “He stood there a moment, listened to the creek, and let the mountain air blow against his face. Even with all this heartache, it was beautiful here.”

— Eowyn Ivey

38. “As Jack knelt in the bloody snow, he wondered if that was how a man held up his end of the bargain, by learning and taking into his heart this strange wilderness – guarded and naked, violent and meek, tremulous in its greatness.”

— Eowyn Ivey

39. “There is hope in our wanting to be something better, even if we never manage it. Maybe that is what I can hold to. The wanting.”

— Eowyn Ivey

40. “He goes not in search of obstacles, only the paths around them. Anything seems possible.”

— Eowyn Ivey

41. “Now that I have been brought home by carriage and climbed into my bed, my fury has burned out, and I am left cold and tired. Why do we insist on inflicting more suffering on a world that is already fraught with it? It is here that I must part ways with Father’s romantic spirit, for I suspect that it is a curse of nature, some original instinct that we have failed to shed. And I am no better than others, for in the face of it, I would keep quiet and retreat.”

— Eowyn Ivey

42. “So I guess I wonder, where is the line separating me into this culture or that culture, saying I have less or more? I’m just me, and like most people, I’ve had my heart broken a few times, but for the most part I have been Happy.”

— Eowyn Ivey

43. “She slid her boot soles onto the surface and nearly laughed at her own absurdity – to be careful not to slip even as she prayed to fall through.”

— Eowyn Ivey

44. “Don’t you think evil itself must exist already inside of a man for him to commit such acts? I could not give him an answer except to say that for all creation men have done such things, the strong misusing the weak. Every civilization has its own versions of cruelty.”

— Eowyn Ivey

45. “Faina would never again be the little girl he had seen darting through the winter trees, her feet light on the snow and her eyes like river ice. She had been magic in their lives, coming and going with the seasons, bring treasures from the wilderness in her small hands. That child was gone, and Jack found himself mourning her.”

— Eowyn Ivey

46. “Why was it always the woman’s fate to pace and fret and wait?”

— Eowyn Ivey

47. “Words lay like granite boulders in her lap and when at last she spoke, each one was heavy and burdensome and all she could manage.”

— Eowyn Ivey

48. “I think there’s this tendency to lump people together, to think that all people who look like this or come from this background must think the same.”

— Eowyn Ivey

49. “Why do we insist on inflicting more suffering on a world that is already fraught with it?”

— Eowyn Ivey