Top 85 Tracy Chevalier Quotes
#2. I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,' she said. 'And I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it's gone. I don't know which is worse - to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.
Tracy Chevalier
#3. There is no need to fear," he said, "for you are here with me.
Tracy Chevalier
#4. 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
#5. Spent much of my life in Lyme with my eyes fixed to the ground in search of fossils. Such hunting can limit a person's perspective.
Tracy Chevalier
#6. God placed the fossils there when He created the rocks, to test our faith, he responded at last. As He is clearly testing yours Miss Philpot.
It is my faith in you that is being tested, I thought.
Tracy Chevalier
#7. I could not think of anything but his fingers on my neck, his thumb on my lips.
Tracy Chevalier
#8. 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
#9. He made me feel an idiot, even when I knew he was a bigger one than I.
Tracy Chevalier
#11. I have a bed and enough to eat and kind people about me. God is still with me. For these things I am grateful and have no reason to complain
Tracy Chevalier
#12. 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
#13. What made him most attractive was that he was attracted to her. Another's interest can be a powerful stimulant. She could feel his eyes on her as an almost physical pressure.
Tracy Chevalier
#14. of all the cities he had been to - Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Salt Lake City - San Francisco was by far the worst.
Tracy Chevalier
#15. Have noticed that people do not change which feature they lead with, any more than they change in character.
Tracy Chevalier
#16. I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home
Tracy Chevalier
#17. He spoke her name as though he held cinnamon in his mouth.
Tracy Chevalier
#18. Life itself was far messier and didn't end so tidily with the heroine making the right match.
Tracy Chevalier
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#23. Everybody asks the same questions
but they don't know that they ask the same questions.
Tracy Chevalier
#24. 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. I patted my basket. I have my own fossils,
Tracy Chevalier
#25. Had come to London for a reason, not to enjoy anonymity and solitude whilst eyeing the wider horizon.
Tracy Chevalier
#26. 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
#28. 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
#30. While Molly and Joseph Anning suffered materially that winter, with many days of weak soup and weaker fires, Mary barely noticed how little she was eating or the chilblains on her hands and feet. She was suffering inside.
Tracy Chevalier
#31. I did not sleep well that night. I was not used to having the power to affect someone's life so and did not easily carry its weight, as a man might have done.
Tracy Chevalier
#32. My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8 A.M. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain.
Tracy Chevalier
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#37. As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.
Tracy Chevalier
#38. Warp threads are thicker than the weft, and made of a coarser wool as well. I think of them as like wives. Their work is not obvious - all you can see are the ridges they make under the colorful weft threads. But if they weren't there, there would be no tapestry. Georges would unravel without me.
Tracy Chevalier
#39. If redwoods are the backbone of California, oaks are of England.
Tracy Chevalier
#40. 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
#41. I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.
Tracy Chevalier
#42. 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
#43. Although we kept the door ajar so that we could hear, we could not see beyond the gentlemen standing in front of the door in the crowded room. I felt trapped behind a wall of men that separated me from the main event.
Tracy Chevalier
#44. It was not a house where secrets could be kept easily.
Tracy Chevalier
#45. It is less distracting in the silence," she said. "Sustained silence allows one truly to listen to what is deep inside. We call it waiting in expectation.
Tracy Chevalier
#46. I knew I should believe him, as he taught at Oxford, but his answers did not feel complete. It was like having a meal and not getting quite enough to eat.
Tracy Chevalier
#47. So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!
Tracy Chevalier
#48. Truly to appreciate what fossils are requires a leap of imagination he was not capable of making.
Tracy Chevalier
#49. I knew that he would go out to the tavern, returning with eyes like glittering spoons.
Tracy Chevalier
#50. Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.
Tracy Chevalier
#51. He stood there at the edge of the orchard looking like he would never be whole again.
Tracy Chevalier
#52. My mommy told me
If I was goody
That she would buy me
A rubber dolly
My sister told her
I kissed a soldier
Now she won't buy me
That rubber dolly
Now I am dead
And in my grave
And there beside me
A rubber dolly
Tracy Chevalier
#53. 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
#54. I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.
Tracy Chevalier
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.
Tracy Chevalier
#59. I feel like a bird who has been wounded with an arrow and now cannot fly.
Tracy Chevalier
#60. 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
#61. We do not need such things to help us to see God," I countered. "We have His Word, and that is
enough.
Tracy Chevalier
#62. The sign of a masterpiece: A painting when there's a lack of resolution.
Tracy Chevalier
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Lick your lips, Griet."
I licked my lips.
"Leave your mouth open."
I was so surprised by this request that my mouth remained open of its own will. I blinked back tears. Virtuous women did not open their mouths in paintings.
Tracy Chevalier
#67. 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
#68. Perhaps thee will best understand what Abigail is like if I tell thee that when she quilts she prefers to stitch in the ditch, hiding her poor stitches in the seams between the blocks.
Tracy Chevalier
#69. 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
#70. We had not meant our choice to cut us off from our past, but it did. We had only the present and the future to think of in Lyme.
Tracy Chevalier
#71. 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
#72. Because thee remains there, it is easier for me to go, for thee can be the shore I look back on, the star that remains fixed."
from "The Last Runaway
Tracy Chevalier
#73. They were a mother's words, words I would say to my own daughter if I were concerned for her
Tracy Chevalier
#74. He was a collector rather than a hunter, buying his knowledge rather than seeking it with his own eyes and hands. I
Tracy Chevalier
#75. 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
#76. I have consistently loved books that I've read when I've been sick in bed.
Tracy Chevalier
#77. 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
#79. I missed the currency of ideas. In London we had been part of a wide circle of solicitors' families, and social occasions had been mentally stimulating as well as entertaining.
Tracy Chevalier
#80. You know I don't listen to market gossip," she began,
"but it is hard not to hear it when my daughter's name is mentioned.
Tracy Chevalier
#81. There followed a time when everything was dull. The things that had meant something lost importance, though they were still there, like bruises on the body that fade to hard lumps under the skin.
Tracy Chevalier
#82. Margaret grasped on to the magic of novels because they held out hope that Mary - and she herself - might yet have a chance at marriage. While my own experience of life was limited, I knew such a thing would not happen. It hurt, but the truth often does.
Tracy Chevalier
#84. 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.
[Woman's Day magazine, March 12, 2002]
Tracy Chevalier
#85. But dying was no drama. Dying was cold and hard and painful, and dull. It went on too long. I was exhausted and growing bored with it. Now I had too much time to think about whether I was going to die from the tide
Tracy Chevalier
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