Top 180 Terry Brooks Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “For a moment the highlander lay quietly and studied the room in silent leisure, allowing the sleep to disperse and his rested mind to awaken fully.”

— Terry Brooks

152. “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

153. “We have thousands and thousands of people living homeless on the streets of our cities at the same time that we have men and women earning millions of dollars a year running companies that make products whose continued usage will ruin our health, our environment, and our values. The irony is incredible. It’s obscene.”

— Terry Brooks

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “Demon stink? On John Ross?”

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

162. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

165. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

167. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

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

— Terry Brooks

170. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

171. “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

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

— Terry Brooks

173. “He understood that letting the magic guide him, that letting it think it was in control when actually it wasn’t, allowed him to be its master.”

— Terry Brooks

174. “A reluctance to acknowledge that there may be wisdom in youth would be foolish.”

— Terry Brooks

175. “Central governments have always been the greatest danger to mankind.”

— Terry Brooks

176. “For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.”

— Terry Brooks

177. “Survive! The word ratcheted through him, an echo that would not be stilled. Endure!”

— Terry Brooks

178. “Morning followed night, as it always does, but Ben awoke questioning the assumption that it necessarily must.”

— Terry Brooks

179. “My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers – Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.”

— Terry Brooks

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

180. “If you’re a real writer, you infuse your characters with truths from your own life. The old saw is, Write What You Know. I think it equally appropriate to add. Write Who You Are. Give your readers little insights into how you think. Share your feelings and beliefs in a way that makes other question their own, thereby requiring them in some small way to reevaluate their lives. Good storytelling compels us to do this.”

— Terry Brooks

181. “There is much to admire in Peter Brett’s writing, and his concept is brilliant. There’s action and suspense all the way.”

— Terry Brooks

182. “I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.”

— Terry Brooks

183. “There were times that being a half-blood bothered him, but Flick had stoutly insisted that it was a distinct advantage because it gave him the instincts and character of two races to build upon.”

— Terry Brooks

184. “Use Redline wireless, he had argued. Use Bluetooth Extreme. Use something that wasn’t hardwired. It was more dependable, less subject to malfunctions than the more rudimentary system they were using might invite. So.”

— Terry Brooks

185. “I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too.”

— Terry Brooks

186. “He shook his head slowly. “Odd. I thought that hearing the truth about everything that has happened would help somehow. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t help at all.”

— Terry Brooks

187. “In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives.”

— Terry Brooks

188. “She was talking about herself and Sebec. She was explaining to him how hard it could be to accept the way things sometimes worked out.”

— Terry Brooks

189. “There were always risks in life. Life was meant to be lived like that because if it wasn’t, then what was the purpose of living it at all? Measuring.”

— Terry Brooks

190. “You can’t stop change any more than you can stop the suns from setting.”

— Terry Brooks

191. “Cats learn early on that very little is accomplished by worrying. Cats also know that things have a way of working out, even when the means are kept hidden from us. Best to deal with things as they arise, and let the future take care of itself.”

— Terry Brooks