Top 180 Terry Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— 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. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “If you do not love what you do, if you are not appropriately grateful for the chance to create something magical each time you sit down at the computer or with a pencil and paper in hand, somewhere along the way your writing will betray you.”

— Terry Brooks

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

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

— Terry Brooks

21. “The unicorns were the most recognizable magic the fairies possessed, and they sent them to those worlds where belief in the magic was in danger of falling altogether. After all there has to be some belief in magic- however small- for any world to survive.”

— Terry Brooks

22. “If you are ever completely satisfied with something you have written, you are setting your sights too low. But if you can’t let go of your material even after you have done the best that you can with it, you are setting your sights too high.”

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

25. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

27. “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

28. “I ricordi non sono tesori di vetro da tenere conservati dentro una cassa. Sono nastri colorati da appendere al vento.”

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

30. “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

31. “If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.”

— Terry Brooks

32. “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

33. “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

34. “I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.”

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

36. “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

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

— 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. “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

40. “You spend so much time wondering who you are, don’t you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forget that the answers are found mostly inside yourselves.”

— Terry Brooks

41. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

43. “A cat never discusses his business with humans, not even Princesses. A cat never explains and never apologizes. A cat never alibis. You must accept a cat as it is and for what it is and not expect more than the pleasure of its company.”

— Terry Brooks

44. “I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.”

— Terry Brooks

45. “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

46. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

48. “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

49. “If anything in your life is more important than writing – anything at all – you should walk away now while you still can. Forewarned is forearmed. For those who cannot or will not walk away, you need only to remember this. Writing is life. Breathe deeply of it.”

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks