Top 180 Terry Brooks Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Everything changes with time’s passage. Only change itself is constant.”

— Terry Brooks

2. “It’s better to die in pursuit of your dreams than to live a life without hope.”

— Terry Brooks

3. “Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger, travel too far that road and the way is lost.”

— Terry Brooks

4. “Nothing is lost that we do not first see as lost. Visions born of fear give birth to our failing. Visions born of hope give birth to our success. What is possible lives within us, and it only remains for us to discover it.”

— Terry Brooks

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

5. “Fear is a fire to temper courage and resolve. Use it so.”

— Terry Brooks

6. “The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present.”

— Terry Brooks

7. “We must nurture and love, if life is to have any real meaning. But First we must find a way to survive against the things that prevent us from doing so.”

— Terry Brooks

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

8. “Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight.”

— Terry Brooks

9. “But words spoken can never be taken back. They can only be measured for and judged on the strength of their sincerity and need.”

— Terry Brooks

10. “Why pretend to be something you’re not? If you have to be someone, be someone no one else is.”

— Terry Brooks

11. “I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.”

— Terry Brooks

12. “If you don’t think there is magic in writing, you probably won’t write anything magical.”

— Terry Brooks

13. “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear you’re young, not stupid.”

— Terry Brooks

14. “Might have, could have, may have, should have – the haves and have nots reduced to pointless possibilities.”

— Terry Brooks

15. “Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.”

— Terry Brooks

16. “Put the past behind you and the future ahead where they belong and spend your time in the present with the rest of us.”

— Terry Brooks

17. “The destruction of the world depends on the willingness of the people in it to harm each other in any way necessary to achieve their own ends and to further their own causes. And we got that part down pat, don’t we? We know how to hurt each other and how to think up whatever excuses we need to justify it. We’re victims and executioners both.”

— Terry Brooks

18. “You can either give in to what youre feeling, just say ‘okay, enough is enough’ and be done with it, or you can fight it.”

— Terry Brooks

19. “Some decisions cannot be made in advance of the time that will demand them. We cannot always anticipate the way in which things will happen and therefore cannot anticipate what we will do. We must accept that.”

— Terry Brooks

20. “If I have the means, I have the responsibility to employ them.”

— Terry Brooks

21. “Life was a myriad of twists and turns that no one could unravel, a path that must be traveled to be understood.”

— Terry Brooks

22. “We are constantly being put to the test by trying circumstances and difficult people and problems not necessarily of our own making.”

— Terry Brooks

23. “Events and circumstances sometimes conspire against us; if we insist on inflexibility for the purpose of maintaining our beliefs, we end up compromising ourselves nevertheless. We salvage one set of principles only to forsake another.”

— Terry Brooks

24. “Remember – we seek a balance in all things.”

— Terry Brooks

25. “Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations. Their right to be free men, Their desire to live in peace, Their courage to seek out truth, Herein lies the Sword of Shannara.”

— Terry Brooks

26. “Things change. Life changes. Nothing stays the same.”

— Terry Brooks

27. “Change comes in the form of repetition. We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything.”

— Terry Brooks

28. “At that moment, he knew what death really meant and he was afraid. There was no adventure in it, no sense of purpose or choice, nothing but a sickening disgust and shock. All those men had died for some senseless reason, died perhaps without ever knowing exactly what they had fought to accomplish. Nothing was worth such terrible slaughter – nothing.”

— Terry Brooks

29. “The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can’t tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.”

— Terry Brooks

30. “Much of what happens to us in life is due to chance and circumstances beyond our control. Being in the right place at the right time. Discovering that others have impacted us more than we know and for reasons that are not entirely clear. But hard work matters, too. There is an old saying: The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

— Terry Brooks

31. “We live out our lives as we are meant to live them-with some choice, with some chance, but mostly as a result of the persons we are.”

— Terry Brooks

32. “Sometimes change is necessary. Sometimes we recognize the need for it, but we don’t know how to achieve it. We misread its nature. We think it is beyond us, failing to recognize that our inability to act is a problem of our own making. Change is the solution we require, but it is not a goal that is easily reached. Identifying and disposing of what is troubling to us requires caution and understanding.”

— Terry Brooks

33. “Friendship doesn’t have anything to do with shoring up weakness. It has to do with respect and consideration for those you care about. It has to do with wanting to give something back to those you admire.”

— Terry Brooks

34. “We are not always properly equipped to face the difficulties life places in our path.”

— Terry Brooks

35. “Who would you be but who you are?”

— Terry Brooks

36. “Sometimes we just have to trust that time and fate will bring us back to where we are supposed to be. Sometimes patience and belief are all we have.”

— Terry Brooks

37. “Well,” he said softly, “in this life you’re often born one thing and die another. You don’t have to accept that what you’re given when you come in is all you’ll have when you leave.”

— Terry Brooks

38. “Past, present, and future, the symbiosis of our lives,” the old man continued quietly, gently. “Our birth, our life, our death, all tied into a single package that we spend our time on this earth unwrapping. Sometimes we see clearly what it is we are looking at. Sometimes we do not. Sometimes things happen to distract or deceive us, and we must look more carefully at what it is we hold.”

— Terry Brooks

39. “The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present. The future I have shown you tonight is not yet fixed. But it is more likely to become so with the passing of every day because nothing is being done to turn it aside. If you would change it, do as I have told you.”

— Terry Brooks

40. “Life went on, no matter the magnitude of the events that influenced it.”

— Terry Brooks

41. “I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.”

— Terry Brooks

42. “Commitment is a journey that works best when each step taken is carefully measured.”

— Terry Brooks

43. “The future is a map drawn in the sand, and the tide can wash it away in a moment.”

— Terry Brooks

44. “We never know what we can be or do until the need is there and we are tested by it. I thought as you did. I was afraid, and I fled with my fear to where I thought I would be safe. But necessity will always find us, and our sense of right and wrong will always find a way to make what is seemingly impossible the reality of our lives.”

— Terry Brooks

45. “Here’s to the end of days gone past – some good, some not so good. And here’s to the beginning of new days.”

— Terry Brooks

46. “It wasn’t simply his choosing to be alone that kept him that way; it was almost a condition of his existence. The feeling that he was an outsider had always been there.”

— Terry Brooks

47. “If you are always frightened for yourself you can’t act, and then life loses its purpose. You just have to tell yourself that, when you get right down to it, you don’t matter all that much.”

— Terry Brooks

48. “I think it is something else. I think we were given a starting point, but nothing more. The future remains undecided. Things may change as events unfold, and we must be ready to change with them.”

— Terry Brooks

49. “Faith, Princess,” the Prism Cat repeated. “It is a highly underrated weapon against the dark things in this world.”

— Terry Brooks

50. “But Miles had always approached life differently than he, always preferring to blend in with his surroundings rather than to shape them, always preferring to make do. He just didn’t understand that there were some things in life a man simply should not accept.”

— Terry Brooks