Top 180 Terry Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Either you believed in something or you didn’t – you couldn’t have it both ways and be honest with yourself.”

— Terry Brooks

104. “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

105. “Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.”

— Terry Brooks

106. “Demon stink? On John Ross?”

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

108. “I have learned to do more with less, so you don’t see the big books anymore.”

— Terry Brooks

109. “Humans populated the world now, and they had no understanding of magic. All they understood was how to savage the land, how to take what they wanted and not care about the harm it caused.”

— Terry Brooks

110. “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

111. “After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.”

— Terry Brooks

112. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

115. “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

116. “What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.”

— Terry Brooks

117. “What once was and was good ought not to be cast aside.”

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

120. “Keep talking, and you’ll eventually sound like a complete idiot instead of just a half-wit.”

— Terry Brooks

121. “There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.”

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

123. “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

124. “It is my job to know things,” the cat said. “Cats know lots of things about the world and its creatures, especially people. Cats watch and listen. It is what they do best.”

— Terry Brooks

125. “Honesty is never wrong.”

— Terry Brooks

126. “Maybe he should phone it all in to Andy Rooney.”

— Terry Brooks

127. “The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don’t change.”

— Terry Brooks

128. “It’s more habit than stupidity when I laugh at these things. I laugh at them to stay a sane man.”

— Terry Brooks

129. “Testing of self is a regular part of our own lives, so it seems natural to make it a part of the lives of my characters, as well, albeit on a much different level.”

— Terry Brooks

130. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

132. “The highlander seemed to float through life very much the same as a cloud in an empty sky, touching nothing, leaving no trace of his passing.”

— Terry Brooks

133. “Writers need their writing; they need their imaginary worlds in order to find piece in, or make sense of, the real world.”

— Terry Brooks

134. “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

135. “Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.”

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution.”

— Terry Brooks

146. “I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out.”

— Terry Brooks

147. “My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago.”

— Terry Brooks

148. “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

149. “But fear was something to be overcome, an enemy of a different sort, not something from which to run away but something to confront. He had done so many times in his life, and each time it made him a little stronger, a little more self-assured. The.”

— Terry Brooks

150. “This search is all about faith. Faith that what’s clearly impossible might somehow turn out not to be. Faith that we can do what we never would have thought we could. Faith to keep going when everything tells us we should turn back.”

— Terry Brooks