Top 60 Peter Heller Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace.”

— Peter Heller

2. “Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it’s too late.”

— Peter Heller

3. “It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.”

— Peter Heller

4. “Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don’t mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.”

— Peter Heller

5. “I want to be two people at once. One runs away.”

— Peter Heller

6. “Sometimes now I think just making it through a day is the point. Practically a triumph, don’t you think? If you don’t melt down or kill anyone or just give up? If you happen to be kind, or help someone else, or create something beautiful, well, you’ve really done something to crow about.”

— Peter Heller

7. “To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.”

— Peter Heller

8. “Funny how you can live a whole life waiting and not know it.”

— Peter Heller

9. “I’m not sure of anything,” she said. “Which is almost wonderful.”

— Peter Heller

10. “How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.”

— Peter Heller

11. “Dusk was moving over the water with a stillness that turned half the world to glass. The wall of mountains had gone to shadow as had the reflections at their feet. In the stillness the rings of rising trout appeared like raindrops. Slowly, in silence, the dark water tilted away from the remaining daylight.”

— Peter Heller

12. “Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.”

— Peter Heller

13. “Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.”

— Peter Heller

14. “It didn’t get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren’t looking too hard at what just happened or who might be down the road or at some other stuff. Maybe living well is the art of not looking at that, at the other stuff, when you don’t have to. Or being okay with it.”

— Peter Heller

15. “What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.”

— Peter Heller

16. “I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.”

— Peter Heller

17. “With everything seeming to fall apart, good habits were one thing to hold on to.”

— Peter Heller

18. “Life and death lived inside each other. That’s what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.”

— Peter Heller

19. “When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation. The only center was her mouth, her hair. It was her. A reconstitution around the core of her.”

— Peter Heller

20. “There’s always relief in committing to a decision, even when there’s no choice.”

— Peter Heller

21. “I’d say it was a relief to have at last nothing, nothing, but I was too hollow to register relief, too empty to carry it.”

— Peter Heller

22. “The albatross hit the top and canted her soft belly to the storm, and made a screaming banked peel-out downwind and over the other side. I don’t know if anyone else on the ship saw her. To me, she was a visitation. Not harbinger or annunciation, but a simple reminder of a wold that worked, that was at home with itself and friends with storm.”

— Peter Heller

23. “A road trip frees the mind, revitalizes the spirit, and infuses the body with Dr Pepper and teriyaki jerky.”

— Peter Heller

24. “Still, some nights I grieved. I grieved as much at what I knew must be the fleeting nature of my present happiness as any loss, any past. We lived on some edge, if we ever lived on a rolling plain. Who knew what attack, what illness. That doubleness again. Like flying: the stillness and speed, serenity and danger.”

— Peter Heller

25. “So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn’t have TV.”

— Peter Heller

26. “Sometimes I think that’s all you need. A good man with a fishing tip, a wave. A woman once in a while. Some work to do that might mean something. A truck that runs, that some faceless bastard two hundred miles away can’t turn off. It’s not much, but plenty when you don’t have any of it.”

— Peter Heller

27. “If one concentrated on one thing and then another – the good things in each moment – the fear wrapped deep in the gut seemed to unswell, like an iced bruise. Still there, but quieter.”

— Peter Heller

28. “There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.”

— Peter Heller

29. “Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious.”

— Peter Heller

30. “She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other.”

— Peter Heller

31. “Is it possible to love by simply not being an ass? I don’t think so. But it goes a long way to clearing a space where love can happen.”

— Peter Heller

32. “Happiness was not a word that seemed to apply anymore, when she had lost so many close to her. There was a contentment that felt deeper, that acknowledged and accepted the quieter offerings of small joys – of love and occasional peace in a life that was full of pain.”

— Peter Heller

33. “And sometimes the places that happenstance sent you weren’t as vague as a direction, sometimes they were as steel-cast and unforgiving as a set of rails. And sometimes the only way to jump the rails and set a new course was to have a wreck.”

— Peter Heller

34. “He had a few good friends who respected him and would do anything for him. Why did anyone else need to be impressed?”

— Peter Heller

35. “No: Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet.”

— Peter Heller

36. “That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.”

— Peter Heller

37. “One of the things that happens to people as they get older, and especially to women on the other side of middle age, is that people forget to notice.”

— Peter Heller

38. “Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child’s swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.”

— Peter Heller

39. “He really your dad? Yes. On my father’s side.”

— Peter Heller

40. “Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run.”

— Peter Heller

41. “She thought that one might not make a dent in the Great Sadness, but one could help make another person whole.”

— Peter Heller

42. “One thing we are learning to be sure of: life does not get less strange.”

— Peter Heller

43. “One thing Pete had learned over the years as a participant in so many disparate cultures, and as a family historian, is that almost nothing that can be imagined is impossible, and that, in fact, most of those things, in one form or another, have occurred. Scary really.”

— Peter Heller

44. “What it is about painting, how it can hit people exactly like music, and hit people so differently.”

— Peter Heller

45. “If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.”

— Peter Heller

46. “She’s a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.”

— Peter Heller

47. “On this side were only low hisses, a ticking and chirping, a simmering crackle like a million crickets, hellfire crickets, singing of apocalypse and char.”

— Peter Heller

48. “There might not be a measure of happiness left in a life, but there could be beauty and grace and endless love.”

— Peter Heller

49. “He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.”

— Peter Heller

50. “I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do.”

— Peter Heller