Top 50 Robert James Waller Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out but I’m glad I had them.”

— Robert James Waller

2. “Life is never easy for those who dream.”

— Robert James Waller

3. “This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime!”

— Robert James Waller

4. “In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.”

— Robert James Waller

5. “Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can’t blame him for never wanting to live without them again. – “The Bridges of Madison County””

— Robert James Waller

6. “Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity’s the real challenge.”

— Robert James Waller

7. “The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it’s been broken into a million pieces.”

— Robert James Waller

8. “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.”

— Robert James Waller

Featured in: Romance Quotes

9. “One great love in a single lifetime was enough for anyone.”

— Robert James Waller

10. “There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.”

— Robert James Waller

11. “It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.”

— Robert James Waller

12. “Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.”

— Robert James Waller

13. “First you must have the images, then come the words.”

— Robert James Waller

14. “And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.”

— Robert James Waller

15. “We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.”

— Robert James Waller

16. “The curse of modern times is the preponderance of male hormones in places where they can do long-term damage. Even if were not talking about wars between nations or assaults on nature, there’s still that aggressiveness that keeps us apart from each other and the problems we need to be working on.”

— Robert James Waller

17. “The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it’s not a bad song.”

— Robert James Waller

18. “God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.”

— Robert James Waller

19. “And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies...”

— Robert James Waller

20. “We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us. Christ, we’re in love. As deeply, as profoundly, as it’s possible to be in love.”

— Robert James Waller

21. “I don’t just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit.”

— Robert James Waller

22. “My contention is that male hormones are the ultimate cause of trouble on this planet. It was one thing to dominate another tribe or another warrior. It’s quite another to have missiles.”

— Robert James Waller

23. “The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.”

— Robert James Waller

24. “Things change. They always do, its one of the things of nature. Most people are afraid of change but if you look at it as something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort.”

— Robert James Waller

25. “Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted.”

— Robert James Waller

26. “So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity.”

— Robert James Waller

27. “Gypsies make difficult friends for ordinary people, and he was seething of a gypsy.”

— Robert James Waller

28. “The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.”

— Robert James Waller

29. “I sometimes have the feeling you’ve been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you’ve dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.”

— Robert James Waller

30. “Why was not important. That was not the way he approached his life. ‘Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.”

— Robert James Waller

31. “I’ll never say it another time, to anyone, and I ask you to remember it: In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.”

— Robert James Waller

32. “To covered bridges in the late afternoon, or, better yet, on warm red mornings.”

— Robert James Waller

33. “Robert, there’s a creature inside of you that I’m not good enough to bring out, not strong enough to reach. I sometimes have the feeling you’ve been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you’ve dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about. You frighten me, even though you’re gentle with me. If I didn’t fight to control myself with you, I feel like I might lose my center and never get back.”

— Robert James Waller

34. “I want to keep it forever. I want to love you the way I do now the rest of my life. Don’t you understand... we’ll lose it if we leave. I can’t make an entire life disappear to start a new one. All I can do is try to hold onto to both. Help me. Help me not lose loving you.”

— Robert James Waller

35. “The curse of modern times is the propensity of male hormones in places where they can do the most damage.”

— Robert James Waller

36. “Anyone who can feel that way about a woman is worth lovin himself.”

— Robert James Waller

37. “People mistake shyness and reclusiveness- both of those- for arrogance. It’s a convenient label slapped on by those who see only the surface of things and nothing more.”

— Robert James Waller

38. “His eyes looked directly at her, and she felt something jump inside. The eyes, the voice, the face, the silver hair, the easy way he moved his body, old ways, disturbing ways, ways that draw you in. Ways that whisper to you in the final moment before sleep comes, when the barriers have fallen.”

— Robert James Waller

39. “We’re all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity.”

— Robert James Waller

40. “Francesca said nothing, wondering about a man to whom the difference between a pasture and a meadow seemed important, who got excited about sky color, who wrote a little poetry but not much fiction. Who played the guitar, who earned his living by images and carried his tools in knapsacks. Who seemed like the wind. And moved like it. Came from it, perhaps.”

— Robert James Waller

41. “I made that horn sound like it never had before; I made it cry for all the miles and years that separated them.”

— Robert James Waller

42. “Remember the great adversity of art or anything else is a hurried life.”

— Robert James Waller

43. “Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings.”

— Robert James Waller

44. “The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable – it could not have been any other way – a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable.”

— Robert James Waller

45. “Sometime I’m going to do an essay called ‘The Virtues of Amateurism’ for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It’s a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don’t challenge them.”

— Robert James Waller

46. “It’s kind of strange – in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.”

— Robert James Waller

47. “Something I’ve never been able to adapt to, to understand, is how they can lavish such love and care on the animals and then see them sold for slaughter.”

— Robert James Waller

48. “The market kills more artistic passion than anything else.”

— Robert James Waller

49. “I gave my life to my family, I wish to give Robert what is left of me.”

— Robert James Waller

50. “Such physical matters were nice, yet to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by the subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted. That’s why he found most young woman unattractive, regardless of their exterior beauty. They had not lived long enough or hard enough to possess those qualities that interested him.”

— Robert James Waller