Top 90 Tracy Chevalier Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.”

— Tracy Chevalier

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Tracy Chevalier

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Tracy Chevalier

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— 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. “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

66. “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

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

— Tracy Chevalier

68. “Mary Anning and I are hunting fossils on the beach, she her creatures, I my fish. Our eyes are fastened to the sand and rocks as we make our way along the shore at different paces, first one in front, then the other. Mary stops to split open a nodule and find what may be lodged within. I dig through clay, searching for something new and miraculous. We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.”

— Tracy Chevalier

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Tracy Chevalier

72. “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

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

— Tracy Chevalier

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

— Tracy Chevalier

75. “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

76. “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

77. “As is often the case, a leader comfortable with her authority does not need to be strident, but can afford to be generous. It.”

— Tracy Chevalier

78. “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

79. “That is what we women are trained for, to give to others, to make others comfortable whatever we feel for ourselves. It can be tiring, thankless to be so generous all of the time. I would like to be a bell ringer. Just to go up in the tower and for an hour concentrate on nothing but the sound of the bells and my place in them. That to me would be heaven. – Chapter 22.”

— Tracy Chevalier

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

— Tracy Chevalier

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “Certainly fossils are a peculiar pleasure. They do not appeal to everyone, for they are the remains of creatures. If you think on it too much, you would wonder at holding in your hands a long dead body. Then too, they are not of this world, but from a past very difficult to imagine. That is why I am drawn to them, but also why I prefer to collect fossilised fish, with their striking patterns of scales and fins, for they resemble fish we eat every Friday, and so seem more a part of the present.”

— Tracy Chevalier

86. “Father always said fishing is about not fishing as much as fishing.” Indeed. And about not thinking. We all need to do things that take us out of ourselves.”

— Tracy Chevalier

87. “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

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

— Tracy Chevalier

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

— Tracy Chevalier

90. “When Gilda appeared – out of.”

— Tracy Chevalier

91. “Quakers never haggled, but set what they felt was a fair price for materials and labour. Each product had what was thought of as its own intrinsic merit, be it a carrot or a horseshoe or a quilt, and that did not change simply because many people needed a horseshoe.”

— Tracy Chevalier

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

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. “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

97. “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