Top 50 Robert Cormier Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book.”

— Robert Cormier

2. “I’m weary of the battle. But a tired fighter can still be a fighter.”

— Robert Cormier

3. “There are moments that stop the heart, that catch the breath, that halt the beat of blood in your veins, and you are suspended in time, held between life and death, and you wait for something to bring you back again.”

— Robert Cormier

4. “It’s amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.”

— Robert Cormier

5. “The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”

— Robert Cormier

6. “People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.”

— Robert Cormier

7. “Do I dare disturb the universe? Yes, I do, I do. I think. Jerry suddenly understood the poster – the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.”

— Robert Cormier

8. “Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence.”

— Robert Cormier

9. “Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.”

— Robert Cormier

10. “And he did see – that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn’t trust anybody, not even yourself.”

— Robert Cormier

11. “My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel – and all the rest has been a sweet bonus.”

— Robert Cormier

12. “He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.”

— Robert Cormier

13. “Don’t miss the bus, boy. You’re missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.”

— Robert Cormier

14. “They don’t actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it’s their thing too.”

— Robert Cormier

15. “My wife likes to say there are two kinds of people, those chasing pleasure and those running from pain. Maybe she’s right, I don’t know. What I do know is this: Pleasure helps you forget. But pain, pain forces you to hope. You tell yourself this can’t last. Today could be different. Today something just might change.”

— Robert Cormier

16. “Nothing glamorous like the write-ups in the papers or the newsreels. We weren’t heroes. We were only there...”

— Robert Cormier

17. “The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth – love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn’t flowers grow out of dirt?”

— Robert Cormier

18. “You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.”

— Robert Cormier

19. “I take real people and put them in extraordinary situations.”

— Robert Cormier

20. “It would be nice to avoid the world, to leave it and all its threats and unhappiness. Not to die or anything like that, but to find a place of solitude and solace.”

— Robert Cormier

21. “Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt ‘safe’ there.”

— Robert Cormier

22. “A smile for all the stupid people out there with bleeding hearts for serial killers.”

— Robert Cormier

23. “When he ran, he even loved the pain, the hurt of the running, the burning in his lungs and the spasms that sometimes gripped his calves. He loved it because he knew he could endure the pain, and even go beyond it. He had never pushed himself to the limit but he felt all this reserve strength inside of him: more than strength actually – determination. And it sang in him as he ran, his heart pumping blood joyfully through his body.”

— Robert Cormier

24. “There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that’s important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.”

— Robert Cormier

Featured in: Reading Quotes

25. “A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.”

— Robert Cormier

26. “That’s what Archie did – built a house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else.”

— Robert Cormier

27. “Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?”

— Robert Cormier

28. “They tell you to do your thing but they don’t mean it. They don’t want you to do your own thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It’s a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don’t disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say.”

— Robert Cormier

29. “He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.”

— Robert Cormier

30. “Do I dare disturb the universe? Yes I do, I do. I think.”

— Robert Cormier

31. “You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.”

— Robert Cormier

32. “It doesn’t matter how big the body, it’s what you do with it.”

— Robert Cormier

33. “She discovered how distant pity was from hate, how very far it was from love.”

— Robert Cormier

34. “He closed the locker quickly so no one would see the damage. For some reason, he felt ashamed.”

— Robert Cormier

35. “I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.”

— Robert Cormier

36. “A writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad.”

— Robert Cormier

37. “Archie believed in always doing the smart thing. Not the thing you ached to do, not the impulsive act, but the thing that would pay off later.”

— Robert Cormier

38. “A terrific sadness swept over Jerry. As if somebody had died. The way he felt standing in the cemetry that day they buried his mother. And nothing you could do about it.”

— Robert Cormier

39. “He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine – not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.”

— Robert Cormier

40. “It came to me that hell would not be fire and smoke after all but arctic, everything white and frigid. Hell would be not anger but indifference.”

— Robert Cormier

41. “Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he’d always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.”

— Robert Cormier

42. “I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don’t think about how old they are.”

— Robert Cormier

43. “Go get your bus, square boy.”

— Robert Cormier

44. “I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.”

— Robert Cormier

45. “You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It’s the adults who get upset.”

— Robert Cormier

46. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t trying to get something down on paper.”

— Robert Cormier

47. “I’ve had aunts and uncles who not only haven’t read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.”

— Robert Cormier

48. “Happiness is a way of traveling and not a destination.”

— Robert Cormier

49. “Was this all there was to life, after all? You finished school, found an occupation, got married, became a father, watched your wife die, and then lived through days and nights that seemed to have no sunrises, no dawns and no dusks, nothing but a gray drabness.”

— Robert Cormier

50. “I don’t laugh very much,” he said, realizing the truth of the statement as he made it, this sudden bit of knowledge disturbing him.”

— Robert Cormier