Top 35 H.G. Parry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nothing stays hidden. Secrets are always found out, and the world is unforgiving.”

— H.G. Parry

2. “Today was my first day of high school, and it was not as expected. I thought people would want to learn in high school. Perhaps that was naive.”

— H.G. Parry

3. “Every supporting character is the protagonist of his own story.”

— H.G. Parry

4. “Let me try to warn you again. Knowledge is dangerous.”

— H.G. Parry

5. “Something has to be heard to be ignored. He heard me this time, and he ignored me.”

— H.G. Parry

6. “I don’t care what everyone says, damaging books is worse than damaging people. People heal up. Books never do. The marks always show.”

— H.G. Parry

7. “What we see when we look at people is just a bundle of our own interpretations.”

— H.G. Parry

8. “I want to live in the world, unbound, following nobody’s plots but my own.”

— H.G. Parry

9. “There are coincidences in life, not in books. Everything in a book is placed there for a reason. What’s the reason for this one?”

— H.G. Parry

10. “History is every bit as much of a story as fiction.”

— H.G. Parry

11. “People weather storms they should never be able to survive and then collapse once they’ve passed, as though the storm itself kept them upright.”

— H.G. Parry

12. “Sherlock Holmes stories glorify human intellect; his criminals are intellectual puzzles to be solved, not living breathing inhabitants of a world in their own right.”

— H.G. Parry

13. “That’s what all laws should do. Impose the restrictions that, if human beings were always moral and rational, they would impose upon themselves.”

— H.G. Parry

14. “It’s not fair. It feels good to write it, even if it doesn’t change it. It’s not fair. It’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not FAIR. It’s. Not. Fair. I know that life isn’t. But stories are. Or if they’re not fair, they’re not fair with purpose. I wish I could tell better where stories end and life begins.”

— H.G. Parry

15. “It scares the living daylights out of everybody. Present company excepted, I’m sure.” “I don’t really do living or daylight,” Dorian said. “I’m a Gothic masterpiece.”

— H.G. Parry

16. “That’s not what Charley says,” I returned. I felt, illogically, that I was scoring a point. “He says that feelings are a mind picking up on things it doesn’t always understand.” “Perhaps. But if so, they are a poor substitute for true understanding.”

— H.G. Parry

17. “As I recall,” Millie said, “in your book, your secret isn’t revealed until you stab your painting in the heart.” He shrugged. “That’s how all secrets are revealed, in the end. Either someone else betrays us, or we betray ourselves.”

— H.G. Parry

18. “Where the light was strongest, there were no buildings.”

— H.G. Parry

19. “Books don’t hurt people.” “What comes out of them jolly well does.”

— H.G. Parry

20. “Truth, at least complete truth, isn’t held in words. But there would be no truth at all without them. It lies behind them and lurks around them and shines through them, in glimpses of metaphor, and connotation, and story.”

— H.G. Parry

21. “That’s the danger of stories,” Mum said. Lydia and I weren’t the only ones thinking about Charley, obviously. “They bring things into the world, and they can’t be put away again.”

— H.G. Parry

22. “Kind people don’t make things happen. They try to prevent bad things from happening, and they fail, and they live in fear of that failure. So do those under their protection.”

— H.G. Parry

23. “I thought you were sticking to poetry lately. Those postmodern things that read like a dictionary mated with a Buddhist mantra and couldn’t possibly make any sense to anyone.” “There is not a poem on earth that doesn’t make any sense to anyone.”

— H.G. Parry

24. “What you need to understand about protagonists, Sutherland, is that we’re all busy with our own plots. We can’t help it; we’re not used to sharing our stories.”

— H.G. Parry

25. “The only thing more tedious than someone else’s crises are one’s own.”

— H.G. Parry

26. “I thought you said everything in a book has meaning.” “It does! That doesn’t mean it means what you want it to mean!”

— H.G. Parry

27. “She’s from a children’s book,” Charley pointed out. “That makes her by definition more capable than most adults.”

— H.G. Parry

28. “There is not a poem on earth that doesn’t make sense to anyone.”

— H.G. Parry

29. “They won’t do anything here either. They’ll listen, and they’ll nod, and they’ll agree what a shame it is. Some will even say it very loudly and angrily. But they won’t act. People are dying, and suffering worse than death – hundreds of thousands of people. I know they weigh on your soul. Words won’t save them. Somebody, somewhere, must actually do something, and that must be you.”

— H.G. Parry

30. “Death isn’t a habit you develop, you know, like tobacco or whiskey. It only takes once.”

— H.G. Parry

31. “Visions are dangerous when nobody else can see them.”

— H.G. Parry

32. “But I need to reassure the others first. They’ll be all out of sorts.” “Reassure them of what?” “Oh, you know,” she said. “Everything’s perfectly all right, that sort of thing.” “And is it?” Charley asked. “Of course not,” she snorted. “If it were, they wouldn’t need me to tell them.”

— H.G. Parry

33. “She was a liminal person, trapped between a world she’d grown out of and another that wouldn’t let her in. It was one reason why she wanted to leave the island so badly – the hope that leaving the place she’d grown up would help her leave her childhood behind. Not forever, not yet. But for a visit, to see what it was like.”

— H.G. Parry

34. “It’s not complicated. It’s just the idea that every book has an implied reader – a sort of imaginary person the author has in mind while he’s writing.”

— H.G. Parry

35. “That was the trouble with the magic that bespelled the walls of the House of Commoners. It responded to eloquence, not truth. Wilberforce had once, a very long time ago, thought the two were interchangeable. Now he knew it was just as easy to be eloquent and wrong as it was to be eloquent and right.”

— H.G. Parry

36. “It was just that whenever she had thought of seeing the world, she had never realized what it would be like to have the world see her back.”

— H.G. Parry

37. “I sometimes think ‘just this once’ is the most dangerous phrase in the English language.”

— H.G. Parry

38. “We’ve read our own myths into the world.”

— H.G. Parry

39. “We love Dickens because he tell us stories, and because he tell us that we are all stories. We are. We are more than stories, of course. But we have to start somewhere. And there are many worse places to start than, ‘Chapter One: I am Born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that stations will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

— H.G. Parry