Top 50 Traci Chee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Together, we can do anything.”

— Traci Chee

2. “Wanting the world to be a better place than it is? That doesn’t make you weak. That makes you the kind of person this world needs.”

— Traci Chee

3. “We are not free. But we are not alone.”

— Traci Chee

4. “Life’s not fair, but she doesn’t need it to be fair, because she can take anything life throws at her, and she won’t break.”

— Traci Chee

5. “We could do everything right, and they’d still think we were dangerous.”

— Traci Chee

6. “See, we don’t got liberty, we don’t got property, but you better believe we’ve got the Great American Right to die for a country that doesn’t want us.”

— Traci Chee

7. “I think you believe you ought to be small,” he said softly, almost meditatively. “I think you have been taught that greatness does not belong to you, and that to want it is perverse. I think you have folded yourself into the shape that others expect of you; but that shape does not suit you, has never suited you, and all your young life, you have been dying to be free of it.”

— Traci Chee

8. “But books are curious objects. They have the power to trap, transport, and even transform you if you are lucky.”

— Traci Chee

9. “Being an American won’t protect you when you have faces like ours.”

— Traci Chee

10. “Tyranny is locking us up. Tyranny is taking our freedom. Tyranny is right here. Tyranny is American.”

— Traci Chee

11. “Once there was, and one day there will be.”

— Traci Chee

12. “Nothing was okay. And he was far from home.”

— Traci Chee

13. “History is not dead. We have not moved on. Like Minnow and many of my other characters, I love this country because it is my home, and my parents’ home, and my grandparents’ home, and because I was raised to believe in the opportunity and equality America promises, but this does not prevent me from seeing its problems, seeing all the ways it has failed its people again and again.”

— Traci Chee

14. “What is written comes to pass.”

— Traci Chee

15. “Was it enough to live on in legend if the legends were lies?”

— Traci Chee

16. “He and I were standing on the curb, talking, as a group of Caucasian guys approached us, walking three abreast, like they were a great white plow rolling down the sidewalk. Without even thinking about it, I stepped aside, Leonard stepped aside, and I wondered at how we’d been trained to do this, to recede, to shrink, so that Caucasians can have more space.”

— Traci Chee

17. “If someone always said, You have to do this for me before I do this for you, then nothing would ever get done.”

— Traci Chee

18. “You want and you want and you want, and no amount of wanting will return the moments you have lost and the people you have loved, but you have not lost so many pieces of yourself that you don’t want to give away one more.”

— Traci Chee

19. “Home’s what you make it.” Nin shrugged. “Could be a ship. Could be what you carry around on your back day after day. Could be family. Or maybe just one person you love more than any other. That’s home.” The.”

— Traci Chee

20. “Maybe someone was reading her right now, and if she looked up, she would see their eyes staring down at her, following her every move. Maybe someone was reading the reader.”

— Traci Chee

21. “In a world where the only evidence of your existence was a body subject to decay and the works you left behind when the body was gone, you tried all manner of things to convince yourself that your life had some meaning, some permanence.”

— Traci Chee

22. “I want to believe in right and wrong. Here is what’s right. Here is what isn’t. Here is the line. Here is the question: If I got to war for America, if I kill for America, if I support an America that doesn’t support me, and I supporting my oppressors? Am I killing their enemies so they can later kill me?”

— Traci Chee

23. “Soft as an echo, I feel I am fading – Fading until I am gone. Still I remain. I am listening and waiting – Waiting for you to go on. Once more, once more. Tell me my story once more. Swiftly repeat it before I’m forgotten – Pleading, O tell me, once more.”

— Traci Chee

24. “This is a book, and a book is a world, and words are the seeds in which meanings are curled. Pages of oceans and margins of land are civilizations you hold in the palm of your hand. But look at your world and your life seems to shrink to cities of paper and seas made of ink. Do you know who you are, or have you been misled? Are you the reader, or are you the read?”

— Traci Chee

25. “Peace through war. Seems a funny way to go about it, if you ask me.”

— Traci Chee

26. “But being smart was overrated. Being stupid and brave and curious? Now that’s something stories are made of. Dimarion’s.”

— Traci Chee

27. “In Kelanna, when they mourn, they tell stories – as if the stories will keep you close to them. Believing that if they tell them often enough, for long enough, you won’t be forgotten. Hoping that the stories will keep you alive – if only in memory. But.”

— Traci Chee

28. “Once there was, and one day there will be. This is the beginning of every story. “Once.”

— Traci Chee

29. “If you didn’t like your own life, you changed it. You ran away. You did something spectacular. you didn’t steal someone else’s story and pretend it was yours.”

— Traci Chee

30. “He’s always drawn a lot, but there’s something different about him lately. He used to disappear into the background like he was part of it. Now when he draws, you can’t miss him. He’s there in the middle of things, with this new ferocity, like if he doesn’t capture this moment, he’ll never get the chance. That’s how it is these days. You hesitate, and your neighbors have vanished. You look away, and your friends have been stolen from you. You blink, and you’re gone.”

— Traci Chee

31. “I try to remember what you taught me. Chin up. Back straight. Turn the other cheek. But if we never say anything, will they ever know they were wrong?”

— Traci Chee

32. “Sentiment makes fools of us all.”

— Traci Chee

33. “Once there was, but it would not always be. This is the ending of every story.”

— Traci Chee

34. “But maybe if we tried to change destiny instead of running toward it with open arms, maybe what’s written wouldn’t be set in stone.”

— Traci Chee

35. “If you want to save him, you can’t keep him.”

— Traci Chee

36. “Look towards the horizon, that’s where the adventures are.”

— Traci Chee

37. “Survival is overrated.”

— Traci Chee

38. “Wielding the Book proved even more difficult than Sefia had expected; the amount of information was so massive and so little of it was what she needed.”

— Traci Chee

39. “I hope that in writing things will make sense again. They don’t.”

— Traci Chee

40. “But books are curious objects. They have the power to trap, transport, and even transform you if you are lucky. But in the end, books – even magic ones – are only objects pieced together from paper and glue and thread. That was the fundamental truth the readers forgot. How vulnerable the book really was. To fire. To the damp. To the passage of time. And to theft.”

— Traci Chee

41. “If anything could be a book, there was no telling what you could learn, if you knew what to look for. Smooth river stones spelled out across a mossy floor. Lines drawn in the sand. Or inscribed on the side of a fallen log, half-obscured by twigs and mulch: This is a book.”

— Traci Chee

42. “I started writing to you the day after your funeral. I wanted to believe that if I wrote to you, I wouldn’t lose you.”

— Traci Chee

43. “Why in all the blue world would you sit here makin’ up stories when you could be out there makin’ stories?”

— Traci Chee

44. “Were there signs for each of the stars, and grains of sand on the beach? For tree or rock or river? For home? Would they look as beautiful as they sounded, hovering in the air?”

— Traci Chee

45. “If you’re reading this, then maybe you know you ought to read everything. And maybe you know you ought to read deeply. Because there’s witchery in these words and spellwork in the spine.”

— Traci Chee

46. “It wouldn’t give me more time here, but if I was part of something like that, maybe my life wouldn’t be so small. Maybe I could make a difference before my time ran out. Maybe I’d matter.”

— Traci Chee

47. “Were they all just stories whose endings had already been written, the dates of their deaths pinned to the page with periods?”

— Traci Chee

48. “It was the most terrible sound in a world of terrible sounds, the kind of sound that haunts you in the late hours of the night when the darkness shutters you in and the cold creeps into you through the cracks. When you are suddenly gripped by the unwavering certainty that you are already dead – and gone forever.”

— Traci Chee

49. “People passed stories from mouth to mouth like kisses, or plagues, until they flowed down the streets, into gutters, streams, and rivers, down to the ocean itself.”

— Traci Chee

50. “He’d find a way to cheat death – or die, gloriously, trying.”

— Traci Chee