Top 35 Susan Fletcher Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Perfection is a moving target.”

— Susan Fletcher

2. “We all have our demons to deal with, Little Pigeon. It’s when we cherish them – cradle them to our breasts and feed them, day after day-that’s when they curdle our souls.”

— Susan Fletcher

3. “Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you – others may grieve for the same soul, but they do not grieve exactly for what you also grieve. No-one has lost precisely what you have lost. Not exactly, never exactly. We are in it alone.”

— Susan Fletcher

4. “Imagine it. Use all your strength and imagine it exactly. And it will happen that way.”

— Susan Fletcher

5. “I believe the world is as we choose to view it. Simple as that. Our happiness is, in the end, up to us, and to no one else.”

— Susan Fletcher

6. “Kisses open doors, I’ve noticed. That one gesture can unlock secrets, ease open feelings. It can’t be prevented – these kisses just are. It’s how they work. They break into basements you never knew you had.”

— Susan Fletcher

7. “Strange, what the heart can bear. It can carry grief beyond measure. It can bear a weight that is too great to speak of. But a heart can’t bear the world. It has its limits...”

— Susan Fletcher

8. “Sometimes we have so much to say, we cannot say it. Sometimes it’s best we do not say goodbyes.”

— Susan Fletcher

9. “Love is blind, they say – but isn’t it more that love makes us see too much? Isn’t it more that love floods our brain with sights and sounds, so that everything looks bigger, brighter, more lovely than ever before?”

— Susan Fletcher

10. “But maybe the best thing I learnt was this: that we cannot know a person’s soul and nature until we’ve sat beside them, and talked.”

— Susan Fletcher

11. “I’ve done so many bad things in my life but the stars always forgave me.”

— Susan Fletcher

12. “I have learnt that nothing stays the same. Today might seem the same as yesterday but no day ever is; we may want no changes to ever come, but changes do, in time. They cannot be helped; it is how the world turns.”

— Susan Fletcher

13. “Love is as varied and unpredictable as the rain is: it comes in constant summer drizzles, or sudden, unforseen storms that make rivers burst their banks and Cornish fishing boats rock and spill and lose their crew in the Atlantic.”

— Susan Fletcher

14. “I know this: there is no sense to grief. There is no pattern or shape or texture, and there are no books or stories which can lessen the pain at losing a person you have loved, and will always love. There are no rules, with loss.”

— Susan Fletcher

15. “I’ve heard fate talked of. It’s not a word I use. I think we make our own choices. I think how we live our lives is our own doing, and we cannot fully hope on dreams and stars. But dreams and stars can guide us, perhaps. And the heart’s voice is a strong one. Always is.”

— Susan Fletcher

16. “People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.”

— Susan Fletcher

17. “Is that why we give flowers? To express admiration? Sometimes. But there are other reasons. A symbol of love or of commiseration. A way of saying thank you. A mark of respect. Proof we like someone and want them to smile. And we put flowers on graves to say “Look, we still think of you. You’ve left a space behind.”

— Susan Fletcher

18. “Isn’t it the rarest thing? Never mind the whale migrations, or total eclipses of suns and moons: love that lasts, and is returned in equal measure, is the rarest thing she knows of.”

— Susan Fletcher

19. “The tale is often wiser than the teller.”

— Susan Fletcher

20. “I sought the sea. There was a small comfort in it – in how it never ended, how there were other lands beyond it that I would never see. I tried to see the realm, like that. Like the dead people had only gone elsewhere, to a place I could not see – a place just over the sides of the earth, which is as real as the beach that I sat on.”

— Susan Fletcher

21. “We have our stories, and we speak of them, and weave them into other people’s stories – that’s how it goes, does it not?”

— Susan Fletcher

22. “Oh there is always sadness. Always grief. I have heard folks say this life could be all hardship and sorrow, if we let it be. If we let our hearts seal over.”

— Susan Fletcher

23. “What creatures we are. What powers are in us – in all of us. What we already know, if we choose to spend time with ourselves. What a deep love we can feel.”

— Susan Fletcher

24. “Carefully, she stands. And she runs her hand across the top of Thomasina’s gravestone as she leaves, like how, as girls, they would let go of hands – gradually, moving their fingertips over each other’s palms, as gently as raindrops. She has done this for sixty-eight years and there is a dip on the stone from this. She has worn the stone down with her loving goodbyes.”

— Susan Fletcher

25. “You’re the one who taught me that there is truth below the surface of tales. That we can learn courage from them. That they can teach us how to live our lives.”

— Susan Fletcher

26. “I hoarded all the stories that reflected the light and dazzled me.”

— Susan Fletcher

27. “Rona of the hurting heart. We’ve all had one of those. We have all picked at the seal of things that have been closed against us, and locked.”

— Susan Fletcher

28. “There is not one wide happiness that reaches us all at the same time.”

— Susan Fletcher

29. “Of course I remember. I remember my aching back and the drizzle, and the throb of my piercing in the top of my ear. I’d left university because of him. I’d learnt that I didn’t want to be anywhere he wasn’t, that I physically couldn’t stand it. I was eighteen; he was in his early thirties. I came up the lane and found him standing there, under the limes, wearing blue.”

— Susan Fletcher

30. “There are moments. You will know them.”

— Susan Fletcher

31. “We are the Magick – we are. The truest magick in this world is in us... It is in our movements and in what we say and feel.”

— Susan Fletcher

32. “She never choose anything except her husband, her motherhood and her trust in God. The rest of it was put upon her and she bears it and does her best.”

— Susan Fletcher

33. “And just as this illness changed his life, and hers, and Claudette’s and their house on rue de l’Agneau, so it changed that old, cracked globe. It felt different in her hands – smaller. She’d hold it like an egg that could break under her touch. Because now Jeanne’s mind could not be on future of foreign countries, it had to be on the cutting up of food, the emptying of chamber pots. Her life moved around her father, and loving him more closely – and how could she resent this?”

— Susan Fletcher

34. “Some things are hard, even if they are right. Even if you know they are the proper, decent way. I was glad to have left herbs for those men whose lungs and minds had not known Highland winters before. It was kindness. And kindness is worth showing.”

— Susan Fletcher

35. “But you’ve brought him happiness, Eponine; he is happy because of you – and that was my only comfort as I cried and cried, feeling so lonely, in my house of leaves.”

— Susan Fletcher