Top 50 Susan Cooper Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In the end, all it takes is one small action, by one person. One at a time.”

— Susan Cooper

2. “He was woken by music. It beckoned him, lilting and insistent; delicate music, played by delicate instruments that he could not identify, with one rippling, bell-like phrase running through it in a gold thread of delight. There was in this music so much of the deepest enchantment of all his dreams and imaginings that he woke smiling in pure happiness at the sound.”

— Susan Cooper

3. “The truth is that every book we read, like every person we meet, has the capacity to change our lives. And though we can be sure our children will meet people, we must, must create, these days, their chance to meet books.”

— Susan Cooper

4. “The Three Elders of the World,’ he said, ’are the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, the Eagle of Gwernabwy, and the Blackbird of Celli Gadarn.”

— Susan Cooper

5. “The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.”

— Susan Cooper

6. “So the shortest day came, and the year died.”

— Susan Cooper

7. “Any great gift or power or talent is a burden, and this more than any, and you will often long to be free of it. But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law.”

— Susan Cooper

8. “But a wild creature will always go back to the wild, in the end.”

— Susan Cooper

9. “The night became silver again; looking up, it was as if they saw the moon sailing through the clouds instead of the other way around; racing smoothly across the sky, passing puffs and wisps of cloud on either side, and yet never moving from its place.”

— Susan Cooper

10. “She understood about the comfort you can get from a small separate world, whether it’s a theatre or a basketball team or the inside of a book.”

— Susan Cooper

11. “The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the out-buildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away.”

— Susan Cooper

12. “The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world. That wide grey sweep was the lawn, with the straggling trees of the orchard still dark beyond; the white squares were the roofs of the garage, the old barn, the rabbit hutches, the chicken coops. Further back there were only the flat fields of Dawson’s farm, dimly white-striped. All the broad sky was grey, full of more snow that refused to fall. There was no colour anywhere.”

— Susan Cooper

13. “Tonight will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining.”

— Susan Cooper

14. “Too many!? James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.”

— Susan Cooper

15. “The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world.”

— Susan Cooper

16. “Whatever happens, believe that the journey is worth taking, and then you will reach its end.”

— Susan Cooper

17. “So it will go,” Merriman said. “He will have a sweet picture of the Dark to attract him, as men so often do, and beside it he will set all the demands of the Light, which are heavy and always will be.”

— Susan Cooper

18. “There was something about Great-Uncle Merry that was like the hills, or the sea, or the sky; something ancient, but without age or end.”

— Susan Cooper

19. “But once in a great while he remembered that he had felt pain, a terrible ache in his heart, and he swore he would never let himself feel love for a human again.”

— Susan Cooper

20. “Every human being who loves another loves imperfection, for there is no perfect being on this earth – nothing is so simple as that.”

— Susan Cooper

21. “In the name of King Arthur, and of the old world before the dark came.”

— Susan Cooper

22. “Little Hawk, it is not for us to tell how great and terrible things come about. Only the Great Spirit can see all.”

— Susan Cooper

23. “Expect nothing and fear nothing, here or anywhere. That’s your first lesson.”

— Susan Cooper

24. “He was among trees then, spring trees tender with the new matchless green of young leaves, and a clear sun dappling them; summer trees full of leaf, whispering, massive; dark winter firs that fear no master and let no light brighten their woods. He learned the nature of all trees, the particular magics that are in oak and beech and ash.”

— Susan Cooper

25. “The Herdsman passed, nodding, the bright star Arcturus at his knee; the Bull roared by, bearing the great sun Aldebaran and the small group of the Pleiades singing in small melodic voices, like no voices he had ever heard.”

— Susan Cooper

26. “They walked as old friends walk, without often speaking, sharing the kind of silence that is not so much silence as a kind of still communication.”

— Susan Cooper

27. “For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you.”

— Susan Cooper

28. “And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time.”

— Susan Cooper

29. “They are English,” Merriman said. “Quite right,” said Will’s father. “Splendid in adversity, tedious when safe. Never content, in fact. We’re an odd lot.”

— Susan Cooper

30. “The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.”

— Susan Cooper

31. “People seemed to me to fill life with shadows that should not be there.”

— Susan Cooper

32. “Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes; blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads.”

— Susan Cooper

33. “First of all, you have heard me talk of Logres. It was the old name for this country, thousands of years ago; in the old days when the struggle between good and evil was more bitter and open than it is now. That struggle goes on all round us all the time, like two armies fighting. And sometimes one of them seems to be winning and sometimes the other, but neither has ever triumphed altogether. Nor ever will,” he added softly to himself, “for there is something of each in every man.”

— Susan Cooper

34. “He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which – having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles – he found inaccurate and boring.”

— Susan Cooper

35. “There was something about Christmas Eve, they both felt, that demanded company; one needed somebody to whisper to, during the warm beautiful dream-taut moments between hanging the empty stocking at the end of the bed, and dropping into the cosy oblivion that would flower into the marvel of Christmas morning.”

— Susan Cooper

36. “Never dismiss anyone’s value until you know him.”

— Susan Cooper

37. “Sometimes you must seem to hurt something in order to do good for it.”

— Susan Cooper

38. “Poets find truth by writing about what they love.”

— Susan Cooper

39. “Real is a hard word”, he said. “Almost as hard as true, or now...”

— Susan Cooper

40. “Now especially since man has the strength to destroy the world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvelous joy.”

— Susan Cooper

41. “He leaned forward suddenly, so that for an instant the strong, bearded face was clear; the voice softened, and there was an aching sadness in it. “Only the creatures of the earth take from one another, boy. All creatures, but men more than any. Life they take, and liberty and all that another man may have – sometimes through greed, sometimes through stupidity, but never by any volition but their own. Beware your own race, Bran Davies – they are the only ones who will ever harm you, in the end.”

— Susan Cooper

42. “But if you work and care and are watchful, as we have tried to be for you, then in the long run the worse will never, ever, triumph over the better.”

— Susan Cooper

43. “No, he didn’t win,” Great-Uncle Merry said, and even in the clear afternoon sunshine he seemed with every word to become more remote, as ancient as the rock behind him and the old world of which he spoke.”

— Susan Cooper

44. “So the Dark did a simple thing. They showed the maker of the sword his own uncertainty and fear. Fear of having done the wrong thing – fear that having done this one great thing, he would never again be able to accomplish anything of great worth – fear of age, of insufficiency, of unmet promise. All such great fears, that are the doom of people given the gift of making, and lie always somewhere in their minds.”

— Susan Cooper

45. “The children stared at him, awed and a little afraid. For a moment he was a stranger, someone they did not know. Jane had a sudden fantastic feeling that Great-Uncle Merry did not really exist at all, and would vanish away if they breathed or spoke.”

— Susan Cooper

46. “The wind on the headland whined softly round them, and although, as they watched, Great-Uncle Merry’s expression did not change, they suddenly knew that some enormous emotion was flooding through him. Like an electric current it tingled the air, exciting and frightening at the same time; though they could not understand what it was.”

— Susan Cooper

47. “Great-Uncle Merry stopped reading; but the children sat as still and speechless as if his voice still rang on. The story seemed to fit so perfectly into the green land rolling below them that it was as if they sat in the middle of the past.”

— Susan Cooper

48. “I do not believe any power can possess the mind of a man or woman... I believe in God-given free will, you see. I think nothing is forced on us, except by other people like ourselves. I think our choices are our own.”

— Susan Cooper

49. “It’s all right!” Simon said hoarsely. Hastily he cleared his throat and put his shoulders back, though it was hard to recover dignity in pajamas.”

— Susan Cooper

50. “Trance is fragile.”

— Susan Cooper