Top 160 Jacqueline Carey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All knowledge is worth having.”

— Jacqueline Carey

2. “That which yields is not always weak.”

— Jacqueline Carey

3. “What’s the point of being a grown-up if you can’t indulge the kid inside you every now and then?”

— Jacqueline Carey

4. “Why is there ever this perverse cruelty in humankind, that makes us hurt most those we love best?”

— Jacqueline Carey

5. “Love as thou wilt.”

— Jacqueline Carey

6. “The tapestry of history is woven of many threads.”

— Jacqueline Carey

7. “Fear and lies fester in darkness. The truth may wound, but it cuts clean.”

— Jacqueline Carey

8. “It is a fine line, in all of us, between civilization and savagery. To any who think they would never cross it, I can only say, if you have never known what it is to be utterly betrayed and abandoned, you cannot know how close it is.”

— Jacqueline Carey

9. “Oh love and hate are two sides of the same blade.”

— Jacqueline Carey

10. “Yes my lord, but questions are dangerous, for they have answers.”

— Jacqueline Carey

11. “After you, it’s all cheap tequila.”

— Jacqueline Carey

12. “When Love cast me out, it was Cruelty who took pity upon me.”

— Jacqueline Carey

13. “For every victory there is a price.”

— Jacqueline Carey

14. “Empty yourself of everything,” he said. “Let your mind rest at peace. Ten thousand things rise and fall while the self watches. They grow and flourish and return to the source. Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature. The way of nature is unchanging. Practice your breathing and think upon this, Moirin.”

— Jacqueline Carey

15. “There is no fulfillment that is not made sweeter for the prolonging of desire.”

— Jacqueline Carey

16. “Happiness is the highest form of wisdom.”

— Jacqueline Carey

17. “Stand at the crossroads if you will, but if you’ll not choose, I’ll move on without you.”

— Jacqueline Carey

18. “Even a stunted tree reaches for sunlight.”

— Jacqueline Carey

19. “If you will not die for us, you cannot ask us to die for you.”

— Jacqueline Carey

20. “Genius requires an audience. For all his cleverness, Delaunay was an artist and as vulnerable as any of his kind to the desire to vaunt his brilliance. And there were few, very few, people capable of appreciating his art. I did not know, then, how deep-laid a game they played with each other, nor what part in it I was to play. All I knew was that she was the audience he chose.”

— Jacqueline Carey

21. “There’s more to clothing than just adornment. It does more than merely change how the world perceives us. It changes how we perceive ourselves.”

— Jacqueline Carey

22. “I did not like this place. Everything about it conspired to say, You do not belong here, you are not welcome here.”

— Jacqueline Carey

23. “You should not be here, the forest whispered behind us. You do not belong here.”

— Jacqueline Carey

24. “The wise man,” the dragon rumbled, “does not play games with dragons.”

— Jacqueline Carey

25. “Truly, it is in loss that we learn a thing’s true value.”

— Jacqueline Carey

26. “And having once chosen, never to seek to return to the crossroads of that decision-for even if one chooses wrongly, the choice cannot be unmade.”

— Jacqueline Carey

27. “Your dreaming self seeks to tell you something your waking ears will not hear.”

— Jacqueline Carey

28. “That which yields, is not always weak. Choose your victories wisely.”

— Jacqueline Carey

29. “One must gauge one’s trust carefully.”

— Jacqueline Carey

30. “Those who are too rigid in their beliefs will break rather than bend with fortune’s blows.”

— Jacqueline Carey

31. “There are patterns which emerge in one’s life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation on a theme. So musicians say the greatest sonatas are composed; whether or not it is true, I do not know, but of a surety I have seen it emerge in the tapestry of my life.”

— Jacqueline Carey

32. “Spontaneity is the province of youth.”

— Jacqueline Carey

33. “To have a traitor for an ally is to have an enemy in waiting.”

— Jacqueline Carey

34. “What is a warrior’s first and greatest weapon, young Khai?” “It is his mind, Elder Brother,” I said.”

— Jacqueline Carey

35. “It’s the same questions we ask of our existence, and the answer is always the same. The mystery lies not in the question nor the answer, but in the asking and answering themselves, over and over again, and the end is engendered in the beginning.”

— Jacqueline Carey

36. “Love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel. It is inexorable as the tides, and life and death alike follow in its wake.”

— Jacqueline Carey

37. “There are patterns which emerge in one’s life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme.”

— Jacqueline Carey

38. “It’s funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.”

— Jacqueline Carey

39. “A nervous silence loosens tongues.”

— Jacqueline Carey

40. “All exiles carry a map within them that points the way homeward.”

— Jacqueline Carey

41. “Soon never comes soon enough to a young child.”

— Jacqueline Carey

42. “Nothing spoils idle pleasure like too much awareness.”

— Jacqueline Carey

43. “Pain redeems all. It is the awareness of life, a reminder of death.”

— Jacqueline Carey

44. “I preferred a hard truth to a well-meant lie.”

— Jacqueline Carey

45. “Beauty is at its most poignant when the cold hand of Death holds poised to wither it imminently.”

— Jacqueline Carey

46. “Garner knowledge, by any means possible.”

— Jacqueline Carey

47. “We pay for sins we do not remember, and seek to do a will we can scarce fathom. That is what it is, to be a god’s chosen.”

— Jacqueline Carey

48. “What is fear but courage’s shadow?”

— Jacqueline Carey

49. “My lord. It is too much, and not enough.”

— Jacqueline Carey

50. “Let the warriors clamor after gods of blood and thunder; love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel.”

— Jacqueline Carey