Top 180 Terry Brooks Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “We should not be less than what we are.”

— Terry Brooks

53. “Anyway, that’s the past, and what matters is the future. That’s how life works, because it’s short and precious and kind of doubtful.”

— Terry Brooks

54. “I would never leave your side for a moment if it were possible. But it is not. It is not in the nature of life that we can be together in all things.”

— Terry Brooks

55. “Often, it is the least likely among us who is in a position to accomplish the most.”

— Terry Brooks

56. “A building is a home if the people who inhabit it have memories and love and a place in the world. Otherwise, it is just a building, a shelter against the elements, and it can never be anything more.”

— Terry Brooks

57. “Believe for long enough and it will come to pass. Believe it might be so, and it will be so.”

— Terry Brooks

58. “Blind acceptance of what you believe to be the dictates of fate and circumstance is dangerous.”

— Terry Brooks

59. “But your responsibilities are sometimes given you without choice, without consent.”

— Terry Brooks

60. “Evil contained is not evil destroyed.”

— Terry Brooks

61. “One’s word was a matter of honor. It was not a thing that could be bandied about when convenient or slipped on and off like clothing to match changes in the weather. If he went back on it even once, that opened the door to a flood of excuses for going back on it every time thereafter.”

— Terry Brooks

62. “Our problem is not one of ignorance; it is one of complacency. We are too quick to accept the life we know and not quick enough to embrace the life we only imagine. We think that events must proceed as we dictate, and that no other voice will ever have meaning but ours.”

— Terry Brooks

63. “Hindsight should have lent clarity to his actions; it did not. Rather, he felt a lingering sense of confusion. Everything seemed to jumble together in his mind – all the disparate incomplete reasoning, all the emotions that intertwined and colored. They would not sort themselves out for him; they would not arrange themselves in a neat orderly fashion. They merely shuffled about like stray sheep and he chased after them hopelessly.”

— Terry Brooks

64. “We think we know them, but we really don’t. We let ourselves be deceived because we are always expecting the best out of those who seem willing to provide it.”

— Terry Brooks

65. “You know, Annie,” he said then, his deep voice thoughtful, “fighting didn’t change his opinion. The opinions of others, whether you agree with them or not, are something you have to learn to tolerate.”

— Terry Brooks

66. “Your past was your heritage and the foundation on which you were built. You couldn’t start over. You could only repair and move on.”

— Terry Brooks

67. “What you write chooses you.”

— Terry Brooks

68. “I know you hate yourself for how you are. I know you hate how you look and how you know others will look at you if you reveal yourself. But sometimes, with people who matter, you have to reveal even the worst of what you believe yourself to be. You have to have faith that it won’t make a difference. I would never judge you for how you look. Who you are is what matters, and who you are is always buried deep inside.”

— Terry Brooks

69. “We are keepers of the peace, not soldiers.”

— Terry Brooks

70. “Overhead, the tanequil’s branches formed a silvery green canopy in the moonlight, its strange webbing of orange lines shimmering softly.”

— Terry Brooks

71. “It was not so much a sense of failure that he had experienced as a sense of his own limitations. You cannot do everything you might wish that you could do.”

— Terry Brooks

72. “It is in the nature of things to want to believe that what’s familiar and comfortable will last forever.”

— Terry Brooks

73. “You have to trust in who and what you are. You have to trust in the dream you have been given. You have believed in it until now, haven’t you?”

— Terry Brooks

74. “There were times, she knew from experience, when it was best just to continue on rather than to shift directions, even when it didn’t seem as if you were getting anywhere. Your chances of success weren’t always something you could measure accurately. Perseverance in the face of failure counted for something.”

— Terry Brooks

75. “Do not be so quick to accept as truth what is only conjecture.”

— Terry Brooks

76. “There was that sense of abandoning the familiar for the unknown that characterizes all journeys made for the first time.”

— Terry Brooks

77. “When a massive failure to preserve the integrity of an ecosystem occured, no one escaped the consequences.”

— Terry Brooks

78. “His world was a confusing and treacherously shifting ground, and he did not see that he had any better way to deal with it than simply to keep marching on. It.”

— Terry Brooks

79. “We build too many walls to be honest with ourselves. -Allanon.”

— Terry Brooks

80. “We cannot pretend that the world begins and ends at the boundaries we might make for it. Sometimes, we must acknowledge that it extends itself into our lives in ways we might prefer it wouldn’t, and we must face up to the challenges it offers.”

— Terry Brooks

81. “What kind of world permitted such terrible injustice, where good men were stripped of everything and soulless creatures of malice and hatred survived to glory in their pointless death?”

— Terry Brooks

82. “He didn’t try to think, didn’t care to remember, but wished only to lose himself in the peace and quiet.”

— Terry Brooks

83. “They became sleepwalkers in a world of half-dreams and rambling thoughts with no break in the wearing march or the never-ending, silent black trunks that came and passed in countless thousands.”

— Terry Brooks

84. “Life just swept you along and never took you back to where you had been.”

— Terry Brooks

85. “Honesty is never wrong.”

— Terry Brooks

86. “They were his family, but even your family could be alienated by discoveries they were not prepared for.”

— Terry Brooks

87. “Because life’s dictates did not allow for quick and easy distinctions between right and wrong or good and bad. Choices were made between shades of gray, and there was healing and harm to be weighed on both sides of each.”

— Terry Brooks

88. “Believe me, Kinson, the potensial for evil lodges deep in every man, myself included. We restrain it better, keep it buried deeper, but it lives within us.”

— Terry Brooks

89. “It was the nature of things, of course. Life went on. The best you could do was to hold on to the memories that were important to you, so that even if everyone else forgot, you would remember.”

— Terry Brooks

90. “Nothing is lost that we do not first see as lost, High Lord. Believe it saved, and it may be. Visions born of fear give birth to our failing. Visions born of hope give birth to our success.”

— Terry Brooks

91. “You have to make the best of the life you are given.”

— Terry Brooks

92. “Those who committed atrocities always seemed to do so out of a misconceived sense of righteousness and the greater good.”

— Terry Brooks

93. “Not everything we do in this world is about us, Panther. Sometimes we have do things for other reasons. Sometimes we’ve got to forget about ourselves and help others. If not, what’s the point?”

— Terry Brooks

94. “The future was painted on a canvas of infinite reach; it entailed too many connections and joinings. Change one and you changed others. No amount of insight would enable a single individual to decipher it all.”

— Terry Brooks

95. “She had grown to accept unpleasantness as a part of life rather than to struggle futilely against truths that could not be changed.”

— Terry Brooks

96. “You want to pigeonhole everyone. You like the idea of a world all nicely ordered and dependable. But that isn’t how things are. People are messy and changeable. The world is fluid; the people who inhabit it are chameleons. You want to think of everyone as stable and identifiable, but they aren’t.”

— Terry Brooks

97. “We live our lives hiding from the things that displease and discomfort us. We reinvent ourselves and our history, constantly placing things in a light most favorable to us. It is in the nature of mankind to do this. Mostly, our deceptions are small ones. But they gather weight through numbers, and having them revealed all at once can be crushing. As well, there are larger truths that, exposed, seem more than we can bear, and so we hide them most carefully.”

— Terry Brooks

98. “You did what you should have done. Accept that sometimes the consequences are harsh and unforeseen. Accept that you cannot always allow for every result. There is nothing wrong in this.”

— Terry Brooks

99. “Think about it. Think how it works. We deceive ourselves far more easily than others deceive us. Our false perceptions betray us. Our fears and doubts worm their way into our subconscious and cause us to believe what isn’t necessarily true but becomes true through our own fixation on the possibilities.”

— Terry Brooks

100. “What I have told you is not legend; it is the truth. The sword is real; it rests today at Paranor. But most important of all, the Warlock Lord is real. He lives today and the Skull Kingdom is his domain!”

— Terry Brooks