Top 160 Juliet Marillier Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “In time, your spirit will be with them again, perhaps in a great, spreading tree that shades the place where your grandchildren play. Maybe in a wide-winged eagle soaring aloft, watching as your dear one spreads her linen on the hawthorns to dry and looks suddenly to the sky, shading her eyes against the sunlight. You will be there, and they will know.”

— Juliet Marillier

102. “Let there be a time in the future, I prayed, when he laughs with his children, and plays on the shore with them, and spends all his nights in loving arms. Let us have that. To whom I was praying I did not know. The future was in our own hands. If we wanted a world where such things were possible, it was for us to make it.”

— Juliet Marillier

103. “Don’t you long for something different to happen, something so exciting and new it carries you along with it like a great tide, something that lets your life blaze and burn so the whole world can see it?”

— Juliet Marillier

104. “After a while, footsteps sounded on the flagstones outside and there was a gentle tap at the door. Of course, one of them would come. So close were we, the seven of us, that no childhood injury went unnoticed, no slight, real or imagined, went unaddressed, no hurt was endured without comfort.”

— Juliet Marillier

105. “I did not want to cry any more. Instead I felt hollow, empty, as if all the meaning had been sucked out of me and I was drifting, light as a skeleton leaf, at the mercy of the four winds. I was drained of tears.”

— Juliet Marillier

106. “My world was changing, and I was not ready for it.”

— Juliet Marillier

107. “She said, a child born at midwinter comes into the world on the shortest day of the year. From that point on, the days stretch out. And so a child born at midwinter walks always toward the light, all his life.”

— Juliet Marillier

108. “Become my friend and you embrace a nightmare.”

— Juliet Marillier

109. “Tales within tales. Dreams within dreams. Pattern on pattern and path beyond path. For such short-lived folks, the human kind seem determined to make things as complicated as possible for themselves.”

— Juliet Marillier

110. “I wonder how it takes you, that moment when everything turns to shadows. – Somerled.”

— Juliet Marillier

111. “Perhaps he could still weave together the broken threads of his life. And yet, I wanted him here now. I needed him here. In the darkness, if I sat very still, I could almost feel his presence by me, quite near, but not too near. Didn’t I promise to keep you safe, he would say softly. I have never broken a promise. Don’t look so worried, Jenny. And yet, he would be careful. Careful not to move too close. Careful not to frighten me. Waiting still. I am your shelter. Don’t be afraid.”

— Juliet Marillier

112. “Trust is a thing you know without words.”

— Juliet Marillier

113. “Part of me has turned wild, and another part’s turned dark as endless night, and I’m not going to change back just because someone says I must.”

— Juliet Marillier

114. “Water and stone Flesh and bone Night and morn Rose and thorn Tree and wind Heart and mind.”

— Juliet Marillier

115. “Faolan launched himself across the bridge, uttering a prayer to any deity that might be prepared to listen. “Let me reach her in time, let her keep hold, let this wretched apology for a bridge not crumble under my feet...”

— Juliet Marillier

116. “There is the darkness of a moonless night out of doors, and there is the darkness of a house with its shutters closed and the lamps quenched. There is the darkness of sleep, relieved by the bright images of dreams. But no darkness is as complete, as blanketing, as terrifying as the utter darkness of underground.”

— Juliet Marillier

117. “I like the truth, even when it does trouble me.”

— Juliet Marillier

118. “All that he had of her was his memory, where he held every moment, every single moment that she had been his. That was all he had, to keep out the loneliness.”

— Juliet Marillier

119. “You cannot poison what is between us with your foul words. She is my light in the darkness and Johnny is my pathway ahead.”

— Juliet Marillier

120. “As a novelist, I’m endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.”

— Juliet Marillier

121. “There is no good or evil, save in the way you see the world. There is no dark or light save in your own.”

— Juliet Marillier

122. “Meanwhile, the great ash would rest where she lay, and mosses would creep over her trunk, and tiny creatures make their homes her dim hollows. Even in death she was a link in the great chain of the forest’s being.”

— Juliet Marillier

123. “Seven years of this and I’ll have lost whatever edge I once had,” I said. “I’ll have turned into one of those well-fed countrywomen who pride themselves on making better preserves then their neighbors, and give all their chickens names.”

— Juliet Marillier

124. “It becomes easy,” Finbar said. “It’s in the training; the ability to see your enemy as something other than a real man. He is a lesser breed, defined by his beliefs – you learn to do with him what you will, and bend him to your purpose.”

— Juliet Marillier

125. “I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.”

— Juliet Marillier

126. “His touch warmed my whole body. I was longing to throw my arms around him and hold him close, but the magic of this moment was like a single, lovely strand of cobweb, fragile and delicate. One wrong move and it would snap beyond mending.”

— Juliet Marillier

127. “What did she give you?” He turned and smiled at me, the curve of his wide mouth transforming his face completely. “Faith in myself,” he said simply. “To do what’s right, and not falter, no matter how hard it gets.”

— Juliet Marillier

128. “All the same, our eyes spoke of something good, something deep, something that could grow and flower if the world we lived in would allow it. Something too precious to put into words. Something I would not dare let out into the light of day, not yet.”

— Juliet Marillier

129. “You’ve only just discovered you have a heart. Let it beat a little.”

— Juliet Marillier

130. “You are a child no longer, whatever you might wish. You are a woman with a woman’s body, and you do not think or feel as you did back there at Sevenwaters, when you ran wild in the forest and the trees spread their canopy to shelter you. Men will look at you. Come to terms with it, Sorcha. You cannot hide forever. They will look at you with desire in their eyes. You were taken against your will, and it damaged you. But life goes on.”

— Juliet Marillier

131. “Love... it complicates our games, old friend, it insinuates itself, disrupting the most carefully laid plans and unmanning the most disciplined heart.”

— Juliet Marillier

132. “It was quiet; so quiet. Didn’t these people know how to grieve for a good man? Didn’t they know how to weep, and scream with rage, and curse the powers of darkness in their sorrow? Didn’t they know how to hold one another, and dry one another’s tears, and tell tales of the things he had done, and of what he had been, to see him safe on his way? Where were the great fires, and the toasts in strong ale, and the scent of burning juniper?”

— Juliet Marillier

133. “The person they’d locked up last summer was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.”

— Juliet Marillier

134. “Everyone has responsibility for his own actions. But sometimes we can lose ourselves. Out of fear or sadness or guilt, we become less than we should be. It can be hard to find the courage to move on.”

— Juliet Marillier

135. “Even when I was young and content and thought life would bring good things for me and mine, I didn’t believe in miracles.”

— Juliet Marillier

136. “At some point, we’ll both have to risk telling the truth.”

— Juliet Marillier

137. “Another man might have taken vengeance in blood and fire, or made an end of himself. Regan is stronger than that. There’s a light shining in him, moving him forward: the light of freedom. That’s what draws all of us to follow, to take risks, to keep on figting when we see our comrades fall beside us. But there’s no light without shadow.”

— Juliet Marillier

138. “The error was not yours, Somerled,” Eyvind said quietly, moving to the doorway. “It was mine. I failed to teach you the one lesson you could not do without: how to be a man.”

— Juliet Marillier

139. “His heart and mine added a rhythm all their own. We turned and turned, and with every turning we breathed a little more quickly and held on a little more tightly, and when we came back to the place we started, we stopped dancing and stood with our arms around each other, holding on as if we would never let go, not if the sky fell and the whole world came to an end.”

— Juliet Marillier

140. “Because, when I was away, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Part of me said, yes, it was the right thing to do, for your sake; part of me recognized the kind of man I am, the kind of work I do, the utter impossibility of it. But the other part of me... I felt your absence like a wound.”

— Juliet Marillier

141. “Each of my novels features a protagonist undertaking a difficult personal journey. On the way, each of these characters – mostly female – discovers something about herself and at the same time makes an impact on other people’s lives.”

— Juliet Marillier

142. “This had been real: real in its flaws and uncertainties, real in its small triumphs, real in its compromises and understanding.”

— Juliet Marillier

143. “To return to that realm of shadows for your sweetheart’s sake, Clodagh, is a breathtaking act of selfless love. I think you are the only talisman he needs.”

— Juliet Marillier

144. “The two of them are like open books, they speak the truth at the risk of their own lives, and when they keep silent their thoughts blaze like a beacon from their eyes.”

— Juliet Marillier

145. “The end of the story is of your making, nobody else’s. You can do with it as you choose. There are as many paths open to your hero as branches on a great tree. They are wonderful and terrible, and plain and twisted. They touch and part and intermingle, and you can follow them whatever way you will.”

— Juliet Marillier

146. “You must hold on to hope, or this cannot happen. Let hope go, and your battle is lost.”

— Juliet Marillier

147. “Too much power made people arrogant and unfeeling. It turned them cruel. It blinded them to right and wrong.”

— Juliet Marillier

148. “I’ll go on any path you want. Might give you a push sometimes, keep you walking straight. But whatever happens, I’ll be right there beside you. Rain or shine. Shadows or light. Step for step. Always.”

— Juliet Marillier

149. “You should be brave. Running away isn’t brave. The brave thing, the hard thing is to tell the truth. To face up to whatever it is.”

— Juliet Marillier

150. “To lose you is to spill my heart’s blood. I do not know if I can bear the pain.”

— Juliet Marillier