Top 90 Tracy Chevalier Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I have always admired most those who lead with their eyes, like Mary Anning, for they seem more aware of the world and its workings.”

— Tracy Chevalier

2. “You’re so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.”

— Tracy Chevalier

3. “I heard voices outside our front door – a woman’s, bright as polished brass, and a man’s, low and dark like the wood of the table I was working on. They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our house. I could hear rich carpets in their voices, books and pearls and fur.”

— Tracy Chevalier

4. “I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home.”

— Tracy Chevalier

5. “I didn’t move. I’ve learned from years of experience that dogs and falcons and ladies come back to you if you stay where you are.”

— Tracy Chevalier

6. “Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else’s eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.”

— Tracy Chevalier

7. “I find that when I come out of the library I’m in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.”

— Tracy Chevalier

8. “You know what they say: trouble always comes in threes.”

— Tracy Chevalier

9. “I have consistently loved books that I’ve read when I’ve been sick in bed.”

— Tracy Chevalier

10. “Over his shoulder I saw a star fall. It was me.”

— Tracy Chevalier

11. “Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.”

— Tracy Chevalier

12. “He spoke her name as though he held cinnamon in his mouth.”

— Tracy Chevalier

13. “The sign of a masterpiece: A painting when there’s a lack of resolution.”

— Tracy Chevalier

14. “He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.”

— Tracy Chevalier

15. “It’s a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.”

— Tracy Chevalier

Featured in: Reading Quotes

16. “I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.”

— Tracy Chevalier

17. “That’s how fossil hunting is: It takes over, like a hunger, and nothing else matters but what you find. And even when you find it, you still start looking again the next minute, because there might be something even better waiting.”

— Tracy Chevalier

18. “My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again.”

— Tracy Chevalier

19. “Yes, Mary Anning, you are different from all the rocks on the beach.”

— Tracy Chevalier

20. “I felt as if my parents had pushed me into the street, that a deal had been made and I was being passed into the hands of a man. At least he is a good man, I thought, even if his hands are not as clean as they could be.”

— Tracy Chevalier

21. “I stood by the fire, everyone around me so cheerful, and thought what an odd creature I am – even I know that. Too much space and I’m frightened, too little and I’m frightened. There is indeed no comfortable place for me – I am too near the fire or too far away. Behind.”

— Tracy Chevalier

22. “Pieter would be pleased with the rest of the coins, the debt now settled. I would not have cost him anything. A maid came free.”

— Tracy Chevalier

23. “I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth pigments. I liked my view of the New Church, and the quiet. No one came up except him. The girls did not visit me as they sometimes had in the cellar, or secretly search through my things. i felt alone there, perched high above the noisy household, able to see it from a distance.”

— Tracy Chevalier

24. “At first I could not meet his eyes. When I did it was like sitting close to a fire that suddenly blazes up.”

— Tracy Chevalier

25. “Whatever’s happened to you during the day, as long as you got a nice pillowcase for your head at night, you’ll be all right. You got yourself a place to lay your head, Honor Haymaker. Things are lookin’ up.”

— Tracy Chevalier

26. “As I get older, I use less jewelry – necklace or earrings each morning, not both; my clothes are getting more basic – fewer colours and simpler cuts; and my make-up is stripped back to basics.”

— Tracy Chevalier

27. “For myself, it took only the early discovery of a golden ammonite, glittering on the beach between Lyme and Charmouth, for me to succumb to the seductive thrill of finding unexpected treasure.”

— Tracy Chevalier

28. “I slowed my pace. Years of hauling water, wringing out clothes, scrubbing floors, emptying chamber pots, with no chance of beauty or color or light in my life, stretched before me like a landscape of flat land where, a long way off, the sea is visible but can never be reached.”

— Tracy Chevalier

29. “Paintings may serve a spiritual purpose for Catholics, but remember too that Protestants see God everywhere, in everything. By painting everyday things – tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids – are they not celebrating God’s creation as well?” I.”

— Tracy Chevalier

30. “What’s funny about opposites be that wet and dry both has water, boy and girl be about people, Heaven and Hell be the places you go when you die. They all has something in common. So they an’t completely different from each other the way people think. Having the one don’t mean t’other be gone.”

— Tracy Chevalier

31. “They do not practise the art of conversation in quite the way the English do, but are straightforward to the point of bluntness.”

— Tracy Chevalier

32. “He stood there at the edge of the orchard looking like he would never be whole again.”

— Tracy Chevalier

33. “Say something worth the words.”

— Tracy Chevalier

34. “Life was often simply the repetition of the same movements in a different order, depending on the day and the place.”

— Tracy Chevalier

35. “The second he was gone the women began chattering like chickens at the sight of a fox.”

— Tracy Chevalier

36. “There is a difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes to painting,” he explained as he worked, “but it is not necessarily as great as you may think. Paintings may serve a spiritual purpose for Catholics, but remember too that Protestants see God everywhere, in everything. By painting everyday things-tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids-are they not celebrating God’s creation as well?”

— Tracy Chevalier

37. “California is where you get to start over.”

— Tracy Chevalier

38. “Everything engravers do gets printed opposite. The engraver has to be able to see it both ways.”

— Tracy Chevalier

39. “Nance is funny that way. She likes women her own size – like your sister. She knows where she is with a woman like Martha. Whereas Molly – she’s so – well, so full of life, she makes Nance feel even sicker.”

— Tracy Chevalier

40. “I feel like a bird who has been wounded with an arrow and now cannot fly.”

— Tracy Chevalier

41. “Though grafted at the same time, they had grown up to be different sizes; it always surprised James that the trees could turn out as varied as his children.”

— Tracy Chevalier

42. “Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn’t actually done much about it until I came to London.”

— Tracy Chevalier

43. “I try to write 1,000 words a day – about three pages. When I reach 1,000 words I feel good. Less than that: a failure. More than that: tired.”

— Tracy Chevalier

44. “Yes, my boy; yes, my girl. The tension between contraries is what makes us ourselves. We have not just one, but the other too, mixing and clashing and sparking inside us. Not just light, but dark. Not just peace, but at war. Not just innocent, but experienced.”

— Tracy Chevalier

45. “In general, Quakers did not give gifts, as material possessions should not be given heightened status.”

— Tracy Chevalier

46. “It’s simple, Miss Philpot. This is one of God’s early models, and He decided to give the subsequent ones smaller eyes.” I raised my eyebrows. “Do you mean God rejected it?” “I mean God wanted a better version – the crocodile we know now – and replaced it.”

— Tracy Chevalier

47. “It seemed to me that the baker had an honest response to the painting. Van Ruijven tried too hard when he looked at paintings, with his honeyed words and studied expressions. He was too aware of having an audience to perform for, whereas the baker merely said what he thought.”

— Tracy Chevalier

48. “Don’t write about what you know – write about what you’re interested in. Don’t write about yourself – you aren’t as interesting as you think.”

— Tracy Chevalier

49. “People had gone west leaving behind all sorts of trouble; what they found in California was the space and freedom to create new trouble.”

— Tracy Chevalier

50. “Was it so very obvious that I was not married? Of course it was. For one thing, I had no husband with me, looking after and indulging me. But there was something else about married women that I noticed, their solid smugness at not having to worry about the course of their future. Married women were set like jelly in a mold, whereas spinsters like me were formless and unpredictable.”

— Tracy Chevalier