Top 30 Susan Hill Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.”

— Susan Hill

2. “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.”

— Susan Hill

3. “For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.”

— Susan Hill

4. “A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course.”

— Susan Hill

5. “I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn’t think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it is about a ghost, whereas a horror film can be about aliens or things that rise out of the marsh that have no human shape.”

— Susan Hill

6. “She had a ghostly pallor and a dreadful expression, she wore clothes that were out of keeping with the styles of the present-day; she had kept her distance from me and she had not spoken. Something emanating from her still, silent presence, in each case by a grave, had communicated itself to me so strongly that I had felt indescribable repulsion and fear. And she had appeared and then vanished in a way that surely no real, living, fleshly human being could possibly manage to do. And.”

— Susan Hill

7. “I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.”

— Susan Hill

8. “I do not believe I have ever again slept so well as I did that night in the inn at Crythin Gifford. For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.”

— Susan Hill

9. “My head reeled at the sheer and startling beauty, the wide, bare openness of it. The sense of space, the vastness of the sky above and on either side made my heart race, I would have travelled a thousand miles to see this. I had never imagined such a place.”

— Susan Hill

10. “It was true that the ghastly sounds I had heard through the fog had greatly upset me but far worse was what emanated from and surrounded these things and arose to unsteady me, an atmosphere, a force – I do not exactly know what to call it – of evil and uncleanness, of terror and suffering, of malevolence and bitter anger.”

— Susan Hill

11. “It is okay to climb as long as you are not afraid, because being afraid is what made you fall.”

— Susan Hill

12. “It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve. As I crossed the long entrance hall of Monk’s Piece on my way from the dining room, where we had just enjoyed the first of the happy, festive meals, toward the drawing room and the fire around which my family were now assembled, I paused and then, as I often do in the course of an evening, went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.”

— Susan Hill

13. “I knew him the least well, understood him scarcely at all, felt uneasy in his presence, and yet perhaps in a strange way loved him more deeply than any.”

— Susan Hill

14. “Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.”

— Susan Hill

15. “I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door.”

— Susan Hill

16. “Gardeners celebrate the influence of time. If we have had a late cold spring followed by a desiccating drought, autumn may be the most soft and golden for years; one poor season will sooner or later be compensated for by another.”

— Susan Hill

17. “There are some temptations that cannot be resisted, some lessons we never learn.”

— Susan Hill

18. “There is a continuity about the garden and an order of succession in the garden year which is deeply pleasing, and in one sense there are no breaks or divisions – seed time flows on to flowering time and harvest time; no sooner is one thing dying than another is coming to life.”

— Susan Hill

19. “Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.”

— Susan Hill

20. “In early October, the woods begin to come alive again, and that surprises many people, who think of them in autumn as places of decay and dying, falling leaves and animals hiding away for their long winter hibernation. But it is summer there that is the dead time, in summer the air hangs heavy and close and still, nothing flowers, nothing sings, nothing stirs, and no light penetrates. But, now, there is a stirring, a sense of excitement.”

— Susan Hill

21. “Sometimes a book has its day and, although of course it does not change, the reader does, as a result of having read better things, or new tastes having come to the fore, or fashions in literature having moved on. Other novels seem to have improved, usually because we have matured as readers, our imaginations have expanded and we understand new literary approaches, sometimes because of life events which have opened us up to a new emotional awareness and understanding.”

— Susan Hill

22. “Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.”

— Susan Hill

23. “This gardener will be out in the very early morning and from late afternoon, attentive to small changes in the quality of light and the atmosphere, as well as to every nuance of the season, which combine to create perfection.”

— Susan Hill

24. “I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.”

— Susan Hill

25. “Of all human activities, apart from the procreation of children, gardening is the most optimistic and hopeful. The gardener is by definition one who plans for and believes and trusts in a future, whether in the short or the longer term.”

— Susan Hill

26. “I had not yet learned that we make our own destiny, it springs from within us. It is not the outward events but what we allow ourselves to make of them that count.”

— Susan Hill

27. “The lamps were lit, and a good fire crackled in the great stone fireplace. There was a discreet chink of china, the brightness of silver teapot and muffin cover, the comforting smell mingled of steaming hot water, toast and a little sweet tobacco.”

— Susan Hill

28. “Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.”

— Susan Hill

29. “I like going into a school matinee. I like to be behind the stage because there’s a spy-hole and what you see is the best moment in all theatre.”

— Susan Hill

30. “I’m really quite hard to scare so it was about mining times when I have jumped, and what creeps me out.”

— Susan Hill

31. “I would act, pretend, and the pretense would become real.”

— Susan Hill

32. “I felt dead and sick inside.”

— Susan Hill

33. “I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness...”

— Susan Hill