Top 100 Tracy Chevalier Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “In general, Quakers did not give gifts, as material possessions should not be given heightened status.”

— Tracy Chevalier

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Stay here and do the packing and let the young one run all over California for you! Don’t you always say the success of collecting is in the packing? You’re the boss – take the most important role and stop moaning!”

— Tracy Chevalier

55. “It’s those little daily incidents of life that are dramatic, and if you put a frame around it, suddenly they become much bigger and much more important than you ever imagined.”

— Tracy Chevalier

56. “If redwoods are the backbone of California, oaks are of England.”

— Tracy Chevalier

57. “It is perhaps difficult to understand if you have not had children yourself. The biological imperative of the parent is to protect the child, and when that is impossible it feels like a failure, whatever the circumstances. It is a complicated feeling to live with for the rest of your life.”

— Tracy Chevalier

58. “James found the talk by the wagons tiring after a while. He liked to listen, and he had thoughts of what he’d like to say about the weather, or the corn crop, or the road being macadamized, or the rascals in Congress. But he never quite had the courage to speak them aloud. By the time he had formed words to his liking, the conversation had moved on.”

— Tracy Chevalier

59. “Life itself was far messier and didn’t end so tidily with the heroine making the right match.”

— Tracy Chevalier

60. “Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.”

— Tracy Chevalier

61. “But John Chapman told us he didnt eat meat cause he couldnt stand for somethin livin to be killed jest to keep him alive.”

— Tracy Chevalier

62. “She’d had a terrible time with his brothers’ wives : seeing her with them was like watching someone pet a cat against its fur.”

— Tracy Chevalier

63. “Compliments in America can take an almost aggressive form, as if the speaker needs to defend her own shortcomings rather that simply to rejoice in another’s ability.”

— Tracy Chevalier

64. “She attributed her own fine sewing to the prolonged periods of silence at Meeting; these had made her thoughts level and her hand steady, which was reflected in her even stitching.”

— Tracy Chevalier

65. “Our lives are becoming more convenient but less tangible, and bookshops are the victims of that choice.”

— Tracy Chevalier

66. “His parting would have been solemn but we were too busy to think much of it. We were weaving fourteen hours a day then, with hardly a moment for meals, and I was dizzy with the pattern of the tapestry in front of me even when I wasn’t weaving. I fell into bed each night and slept without moving until Madeleine woke me in the morning. There was little time left to think about a man’s departure. The night before Nicolas went the.”

— Tracy Chevalier

67. “With every task she asked for instructions so that she would not offend Abigail with different ways of doing things that might imply her hostess was in the wrong. Abigail was the sort of woman who thought that way.”

— Tracy Chevalier

68. “It is not easy to let someone go, even when they have said unforgivable things to you.”

— Tracy Chevalier

69. “Jem gazed up into the proper deep blue he knew well from Dorsetshire, coupled with the vivid green of the roadside grass and shrubs, and found himself smiling at these colors that were so natural and yet shouted louder than any London ribbon or dress.”

— Tracy Chevalier

70. “When I left the room, Maria Thins was still standing in front of the painting.”

— Tracy Chevalier

71. “I am Elizabeth Philpot,” I declard, “and I collect fossil fish.”

— Tracy Chevalier

72. “Most other front gardens when planted with flowers looked both formal and artificial. Judith Haymaker, for instance, had put in daffodil and hyacinth bulbs so that they came up in rigid rows, a sight English women would have smiled at. While plentiful, Mrs Reed’s flowers had a randomness about them that reminded Honor of coming upon primroses or anemones in the woods. They were just there, as if they always had been. It took real skill to remove the gardener’s hand from the garden.”

— Tracy Chevalier

73. “She felt so confused by the gap between what she thought and what was expected of her that she could not speak. Perhaps it was better not to, until she was more sure of what she wanted to say. That way her words could not be twisted and flung back at her. Silence was a powerful tool at Meeting, clearing the way to God. Perhaps now it would allow Honor to be heard.”

— Tracy Chevalier

74. “It was no surprise that her sewing was so uneven, for to make even stiches the seamstress herself had to be steady. Abigail tended to hunch over her patchwork, her fingers and thread a snarl, and sew a few stiches before abandoning it to look down the road towards the houses near the general store, or to get up for a drink of water.”

— Tracy Chevalier

75. “The beauty of this girl standing behind him was not just physical, though. It seemed to O that she was lit from within by something most kids either did not have or hid deep inside: soul. He thought no one could ever hate her, and that was rare in this world. She was there to make things better.”

— Tracy Chevalier

76. “When a women wants a cup of tea, usually she has to make it for herself, and forthe others around her. There is no better taste than a cup of tea someone has made for you.”

— Tracy Chevalier

77. “Dee understood now that real couples didn’t have to ask each other to go together: they already were together.”

— Tracy Chevalier

78. “He could not tell all of the California pines apart, the gray pine from the coulter, the bushop from the knobcone and the Monterey.”

— Tracy Chevalier

79. “She felt the strangeness of recognizing a place and yet not knowing it, of having a similar tone as if nothing had changed, yet everything had changed and aged, including Violet herself.”

— Tracy Chevalier

80. “Cuvier has suggested that animal species sometimes die out when they are no longer suited to survive in the world. The idea is troubling to people because it suggests that God does not have a hand in it, that He created animals and then sat back and let them die.”

— Tracy Chevalier

81. “I could have panicked. Before the journey I might have. But something had shifted in me while I spent all that time on deck watching the horizon: I was responsible for myself. I was Elizabeth Philpot, and I collected fossil fish.”

— Tracy Chevalier

82. “It was a funny thing: once you tell your story to others it becomes more like fiction and less like truth. A layer of performance is added to it, removing you further from the real thing.”

— Tracy Chevalier

83. “When you already know how to do something, it can be hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t.”

— Tracy Chevalier

84. “When Gilda appeared – out of.”

— Tracy Chevalier

85. “My beads have gone everywhere – even to Africa. But I have gone nowhere. I want to go somewhere.”

— Tracy Chevalier

86. “I do not respect you, and I will never let you have any of my fossil fish.”

— Tracy Chevalier

87. “So we continued, arm in arm along the beach, talking until at last we had no more to say, like a storm that blows itself out, and our eyes dropped to the ground, where the curies were waiting for us to find them.”

— Tracy Chevalier

88. “As I turned to go I caught the glance that passed between father and son. Even then I knew somehow what it meant, and what it would mean for me.”

— Tracy Chevalier

89. “I have long noted that people tend to lead with one particular feature, a part of the face or body, my brother John, for instance, leads with his eyebrows, it is not just that they form prominent tufts above his eyes, but they are the part of his face that moves the most, tracing the course of his thoughts as his brow furrows and clears.”

— Tracy Chevalier

90. “Torture does not deserve an answer.”

— Tracy Chevalier

91. “Besides, no one can keep me away from my fish. Thank you, by the way, for the crate of fish you left for me. They are a delight. Come, let us go down to the sea.”

— Tracy Chevalier

92. “He was a man, and it was expected of him to achieve.”

— Tracy Chevalier

93. “But you – no, there’s all manner of things you think but don’t say. I wonder what they are?”

— Tracy Chevalier

94. “People who make things also have an ambiguous relationship with time. Painters, writers, wood-carvers, knitters, weavers and, yes, glassmakers: creators often enter an absorbed state that psychologists call flow, in which hours pass without their noticing.”

— Tracy Chevalier

95. “Women always studied other women, and did so far more critically than men ever did. Men didn’t notice the run in their stocking, the lipstick on their teeth, the dated, outgrown haircut, the skirt that pulled unflattering across the hips, the paste earrings that were a touch too gaudy. Violet registered every flaw and knew every flaw that was being noted about her.”

— Tracy Chevalier

96. “At that time turbans had not yet arrived in Lyme- though I can report now that Margaret pushed the fashion onto Lyme’s women, and within a few years, turbans were a common sight up and down Broad Street. I am not sure they complement empire-line gowns as well as other hats, and I believe some laughed behind their hands at the sight, but isn’t fashion meant to entertain?”

— Tracy Chevalier

97. “You have ruined me, I thought. I licked my lips again.”

— Tracy Chevalier

98. “It made me feel odd looking at that eye, like there was a world of curiosities I didn’t know about: crocodiles with huge eyes and snakes with no heads and thunderbolts God threw down that turned to stone. Sometimes I got that hollowed-out feeling too when looking at a sky full of stars or into the deep water the few times I went out in a boat, and I didn’t like it: it was as if the world were too strange for me ever to understand it.”

— Tracy Chevalier

99. “But once children outnumbered adults, it was impossible to control them.”

— Tracy Chevalier

100. “She was from an era when daughters were dutiful and deferential to their mothers, at least until they married and deferred to their husbands – not that Mrs. Speedwell had ever deferred much to hers.”

— Tracy Chevalier