Top 35 Silas House Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes just being still is the best thing you can do for yourself.”

— Silas House

2. “You are so good. So good, you’re always feeling so much. And sometimes it feels like you’re gonna bust wide open from all the feeling, doesn’t it? People like you are the best in the world, but you sure do suffer for it.”

— Silas House

3. “Maybe all the secrets of life were written on the surface of leaves, waiting to be translated. If I touched them long enough, I might be given some information no one else had.”

— Silas House

4. “But you cannot know a place without loving it and hating it and feeling everything in between. You cannot understand a complex people by only looking at data – something inside you has to crack to let in the light so your eyes and brain and heart can adjust properly.”

— Silas House

5. “I had always found comfort in the leaves, in their silence. They were like a parchment that holds words of wisdom. Simply holding them in my hand gave me some of the peace a tree possesses. To be like that-to just be-that’s the most noble thing of all.”

— Silas House

6. “In New York, the buildings are like mountains in some ways, but they are only alive because of the people living in them. Real mountains are alive all over.”

— Silas House

7. “Since that night I have come to understand that sometimes the best families of all are those we create ourselves, the people we choose to be with.”

— Silas House

8. “Surely there is a light in that boy that will never go out, no matter what he has to face along the way. That’s all a father can hope for his child, that a little fire will burn in them to keep them going, to keep them strong.”

— Silas House

9. “I’ve never understood why people run to get out of the rain in the summertime... People will drive miles and miles to go jump in a cool swimming hole, but when it rains, they scatter.”

— Silas House

10. “Now I had seen the grief of the two strongest people I knew. And somehow, Daddy’s and Edie’s crying made them seem even stronger to me. It was better to cry than to suck it up and go around conjuring hate in your heart.”

— Silas House

11. “I wondered if we were put on this earth only to destroy every beautiful thing, to make chaos. Or were we meant to overcome this? Did bad things happen so that goodness could show through in people?”

— Silas House

12. “I hoped that I would give to my marriage the same nurturing that I found easy to give to the corn and the tomatoes. Raising a garden and keeping a marriage in shape are not that different.”

— Silas House

13. “Whole scenes of your life slip away forever if you don’t put them down in ink.”

— Silas House

14. “Maybe all the trees were God. – A Parchment of Leaves.”

— Silas House

15. “It’s more important to show him how to be good to people than how to judge them.”

— Silas House

16. “Learn how to forgive others, including yourself.”

— Silas House

17. “God is in everything and everybody.”

— Silas House

18. “Forgiveness is the easiest thing in the world, Justin thinks. All you do is just decide to do it, and then it’s done. Instantly you feel better, like pushing aside a quilt that is too heavy for sleeping. Forgetting is the hard part.”

— Silas House

19. “Writing is a supernatural thing.”

— Silas House

20. “I wondered if the trees were God. They were like God in many respects: they stood silent, and most people only noticed them when the need arose.”

— Silas House

21. “Why I left, I don’t know. I have never found a place of more beautiful night sounds, have never found a place where I so completely belonged despite being different.”

— Silas House

22. “I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.”

— Silas House

23. “When you have a child, you have to put things aside, though. You have to live for them, if not for yourself. I was aware of this. I knowed that I could not let myself die inside, so I struggled through and made a way for myself. Most important, I tried to find a way to get joy into my life. I made a way for the possibility of joy. I looked for it anywhere I could find it. I got up early and stepped out onto the porch to see day come in.”

— Silas House

24. “The heat was thick as curtains. Night was fixing to slide over the world and the cicadas were calming down for that hushed time between daylight and darkness, when crickets rosined their bows.”

— Silas House

25. “There had been a time when he would have thought this serendipity happened because God was on his side. Now he sees the arrogance of that thought.”

— Silas House

26. “Terror does things to you. It hardens a part of you. I have heard people call others hard-hearted, but it’s not your heart that turns to stone when something awful happens. It’s your gut, where all real feelings come from. That was froze up inside me and I didn’t long to thaw it.”

— Silas House

27. “Autumn air is good for the lungs.”

— Silas House

28. “When Clay was little, newscasters boasted that the War on Poverty was being waged in those very mountains, but if the government had fought any battles close to Free Creek, no one in the holler heard the guns.”

— Silas House

29. “Later in my life I would come to understand that history books are the least reliable witnesses.”

— Silas House

30. “Mamaw says this is the problem with a lot of politicians. “They want to do right, but they’re too scared to,” she says.”

— Silas House

31. “Paul told him everything about quilting, things he would never remember, but he savored each word as if they were lost verses of Scripture.”

— Silas House

32. “There is an animal in all of us who knows how to survive.”

— Silas House

33. “Zealots are always ready to take over. No one ever thought it could happen here, but we were overestimating human beings. Turns out it’s easy to convert more people to a cause that takes power from others, that thrives on meanness.”

— Silas House

34. “You can use the Word to judge and condemn people or you can use it to love them.”

— Silas House

35. “But in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper.”

— Silas House

36. “Only recently had he realized the way books could give a person wings.”

— Silas House

37. “Some nights he thinks they are just a dream God is having.”

— Silas House

38. “The thing that struck me the most about all these letters was his love for the trees.”

— Silas House