Top 60 Susanna Kearsley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I believe there are no random meetings in our lives – that everyone we touch, who touches us, has been put in our path for a reason. The briefest encounter can open a door, or heal a wound, or close a circle that was started long before your birth.”

— Susanna Kearsley

2. “You only have to change the value of one variable to affect the outcome of the whole equation.”

— Susanna Kearsley

3. “Knowing that the battle will not end the way he wishes does not make it any less worthwhile the fight.”

— Susanna Kearsley

4. “Whatever might become of them, she knew that there was nothing that could rob them of that happiness. For they had lived their winter, and the spring had finally come.”

— Susanna Kearsley

5. “My love, cease thy weeping, now listen to me, For waking and sleeping, my heart is with thee; Love, let nothing grieve thee, and do not complain, For I never will leave thee, while life doth remain.”

— Susanna Kearsley

6. “The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change, and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die.”

— Susanna Kearsley

7. “It’s too easy, you see, to get trapped in the past. The past is very seductive. People always talk about the mists of time, you know, but really it’s the present that’s in a mist, uncertain. The past is quite clear, and warm, and comforting. That’s why people often get stuck there.”

— Susanna Kearsley

8. “Tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories.”

— Susanna Kearsley

9. “When I meet a wind I cannot fight, I can do naught but set my sails to let it take me where it will.”

— Susanna Kearsley

10. “I couldn’t stop it from happening,” I told her. “I’ve been able to stop it before, but this time I just couldn’t stop it from happening.” “Well, now.” Her blue eyes were very wise. “You’ve learned a valuable lesson from this, then, haven’t you? You can’t cheat fate, Julia. If you don’t go looking for the lessons of the past, then the past will come looking for you.”

— Susanna Kearsley

11. “If it is true that men have souls that do survive them, he went on, ignoring me, and if those souls are born again to life, you need not worry that my ghost will haunt you. I’ll haunt you in the flesh, instead.”

— Susanna Kearsley

12. “Where’e’er I go, my Soul shall stay with thee: ‘Tis but my Shadow that I take away;.”

— Susanna Kearsley

13. “I’d always been puzzled when books about people with Asperger’s claimed that we didn’t have empathy. True, I might have trouble sometimes guessing how another person felt, but sadness was an obvious emotion and an easy one to spot most of the time. My problem wasn’t that I didn’t understand their feelings, only that I didn’t have a clue how to respond to them. I never knew the proper thing to do or say. I wasn’t good at comforting. He.”

— Susanna Kearsley

14. “God always gives us people for a reason, lass. He takes them from us too, but when He puts them in our path and gives them back to us again, we would be great fools not to realize that He means us to belong to them.”

— Susanna Kearsley

15. “I’m sure it was a good house in its time as well, but sometimes what is left behind when something has been lost is even better than the thing that came before.”

— Susanna Kearsley

16. “I would argue ’tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories. That is why we find that having lived them once, we never can recapture them.”

— Susanna Kearsley

17. “A grieving person’s like a person treading in deep water – if they’ve nothing to hold on to, they lose hope. They slide right under.”

— Susanna Kearsley

18. “Take you my ring,” he repeated, “and keep it with you.” His tone was stubborn, and so I obeyed, sliding the great ring from his outstretched finger. The ring was cold, as his hands were cold, and I held it tenderly in my palm, blinking back the rising wetness of my eyes. “Remember that hawk, Mariana Farr,” he told me gently, “and seek me not with your eyes, but with your soul. The soul sees what truly matters.”

— Susanna Kearsley

19. “Men who watch, and say little, very often are much wiser than the men they serve.”

— Susanna Kearsley

20. “The strongest soldier cannot balance long upon the blade that does divide his honor and his heart, and whatever way he falls, the cut will kill him.”

— Susanna Kearsley

21. “David McClelland was changed by that day more than most men.”

— Susanna Kearsley

22. “The secret to keeping one’s actions concealed from the enemy is, in most cases, to learn what he thinks you will do, and then seem to be doing it, for that is what he’ll believe.”

— Susanna Kearsley

23. “It really was unfair how nature always gave the longest eyelashes to men.”

— Susanna Kearsley

24. “But life, if nothing else, had taught her promises weren’t always to be counted on, and what appeared at first a shining chance might end in bitter disappointment.”

— Susanna Kearsley

25. “While the other women turned back to their talk of Saint-Germain, she took the opportunity to curl into her chair again and read, and so remove herself from all her greater cares and all the people causing them.”

— Susanna Kearsley

26. “Because everything does make sense, when you look at it from the right angle. All you have to do is find out what that angle is, for whatever it is you want to understand, and bang, the universe becomes a rational place.”

— Susanna Kearsley

27. “I think we all make choices in our lives that set us down the road to happiness or disappointment. It’s just that we can’t always see where the road is leading us until we’re halfway there.”

— Susanna Kearsley

28. “If we cannae be what we were born to be, the whole of it, we die a little on the inside, every day we live the lie.”

— Susanna Kearsley

29. “The world becomes a wider place, with but a little learning.”

— Susanna Kearsley

30. “But till then, I could wait – I was in no great hurry. Like the swans, I had mated for life.”

— Susanna Kearsley

31. “Silence in the face of nonsense, that’s what my father always said.”

— Susanna Kearsley

32. “Ye’ll learn more of a man if ye look at his face when he’s looking at somebody else, than ye’ll learn any other way, but,′ he advised her, ’ye have to keep silent to do it.”

— Susanna Kearsley

33. “If I’m still on my feet, then I’m meant to be living. I’ll not give up all of my pleasures.”

— Susanna Kearsley

34. “But at the moment, surrounded by strangers in a wild landscape, with the remnants of a long-dead civilization spread at my feet, such things as ghosts seemed possible.”

— Susanna Kearsley

35. “Some things, I reasoned, simply ran in a person’s blood.”

— Susanna Kearsley

36. “Mary could have told him that it was no use, that she had called her father back and it had made no difference, that if something once desired to leave you it was lost already and forever.”

— Susanna Kearsley

37. “Wars lay easier upon the conscience, Lydia decided, when you could not see the faces of the people you were fighting. And it was vastly easier to hate a man when you’d not learned his Christian name, or pried into his private thoughts and learned that he was human.”

— Susanna Kearsley

38. “Some things weren’t meant to live in cages.”

— Susanna Kearsley

39. “Life moves on,” she said gently, “and ye cannae go back. You’ve only got one chance to get it right.”

— Susanna Kearsley

40. “I told ye I’d come back to ye.”

— Susanna Kearsley

41. “I’d met people in my life who were pure poison. I had learnt to know the look of them – the way their smiles came and went and never touched their eyes, those eyes that could be so intense at times and yet revealed no soul. Such people might look normal, but inside it was as though some vital part of them was missing, and whenever I saw eyes like that I’d learnt to turn and run and guard my back while I was leaving.”

— Susanna Kearsley

42. “No matter what the bards may say, there’s no romance in dying for a man.”

— Susanna Kearsley

43. “Let the devil bar my way, I will come back to ye.”

— Susanna Kearsley

44. “We rarely see the things we don’t expect to see.”

— Susanna Kearsley

45. “Looking at old photographs was like that. Magic.”

— Susanna Kearsley

46. “The face is a plain one,” said Hugh, “but the workings inside will not fail ye.”

— Susanna Kearsley

47. “Any man deserving of your notice will need nothing to impress him but that you should be yourself, and any man deserving of your love will see you as you truly are, and love you notwithstanding.”

— Susanna Kearsley

48. “Always he’s looking for something, he’s chasing it. Always the neighbour’s grass is greener, somewhere else, over the next hill.” Her smile was slight. “My grass is green enough.”

— Susanna Kearsley

49. “But it is by our actions, surely, and not by our words, that we reveal our worth.”

— Susanna Kearsley

50. “Exactly. And her son, King James the Sixth, who afterwards became King James the First of England also, when the English Queen Elizabeth the First died with no children to succeed her.” “And King James the Sixth,” I asked. “Was he a Catholic or a Protestant?” “Protestant. As was his son, Charles the First.”

— Susanna Kearsley