Top 100 Susanna Kearsley Quotes
#1. Any man deserving of your notice will need nothing to impress him but that you should be yourself, and any man deserving of your love will see you as you truly are, and love you notwithstanding.
Susanna Kearsley
#2. The moonlight made ghosts of the bed hangings, and cast a spectral pool about my feet
Susanna Kearsley
#3. We don't let them die, in Wales
Merlin, and Arthur and Owain
we keep them close by and asleep in the hills to be awakended if ever we need them.
Susanna Kearsley
#4. But life, if nothing else, had taught her promises weren't always to be counted on, and what appeared at first a shining chance might end in bitter disappointment.
Susanna Kearsley
#5. These are your beautiful days, Julia Beckett, he promised softly.
Susanna Kearsley
#6. People didn't just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn't hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit's incomplete.
Susanna Kearsley
#7. hard-scraping tools, with his sharp-featured face and the mirthless dark eyes that seemed always, whenever
Susanna Kearsley
#8. I have seen and really liked the varied movie adaptations of the book, but 'Little Women' has a sprawling, richly tangled story that needs time and space to weave its magic.
Susanna Kearsley
#9. She nodded, looking down at the small wooden bird, a plain thing carved by a great man who'd always taken pleasure in creating things with his own hands. She's telling me, I think, that I should seek to be none other than myself, and so fly always like the bird that I was born to be.
Susanna Kearsley
#10. Better to find out certain things by living them, not by reading them in a book.
Susanna Kearsley
#11. I'd never met a redhead yet who didn't have the same allure - a sort of blend of vibrant energy and freshness that made those of us with brown hair feel ridiculously dull.
Susanna Kearsley
#12. Then, stop worrying so much what the rest of us think; just get on the damned donkey and ride it.
Susanna Kearsley
#13. After the loss of my sister - my darkest time - I tried to think of the beauty she'd brought to this world and the lives she had touched and the love she had left behind.
Susanna Kearsley
#14. I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published.
Susanna Kearsley
#15. Of course," Armand was saying to Simon, "you know that it was an American, like yourself, who nearly ruined the wine-making in France?" "We're Canadians." "But that is the same thing, surely?
Susanna Kearsley
#16. I would argue 'tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories. That is why we find that having lived them once, we never can recapture them.
Susanna Kearsley
#17. My mother, come to think of it, would have been a welcome sight jut now ... "There are no such things as ghosts," she would have told me, and of course I would have believed her
Susanna Kearsley
#18. In my book 'The Winter Sea,' set north of Aberdeen, I couldn't just ignore the fact some people there - especially the people in the past - would speak the Doric.
Susanna Kearsley
#20. To sail beyond the sunset ... I'd thought that beautiful, once. But now I knew it was a wasted effort, chasing sunsets. There was nothing on the other side.
Susanna Kearsley
#21. Whatever might become of them, she knew that there was nothing that could rob them of that happiness. For they had lived their winter, and the spring had finally come.
Susanna Kearsley
#22. Oliver ... '
'What?'
'I do like you.'
'But?'
'I just don't want you to think that I'm ... that is, I'm really not looking for ... '
'Hey.' I could hear the faint smile in his voice. 'It's a book, not an etching.
Susanna Kearsley
#23. The years might change our outer selves, but underneath it all we stayed the same, we kept our patterns ...
Susanna Kearsley
#24. Life is always uncertain,'he said with a shrug. 'We cannot let the fear of what might happen stop us living as we choose.
Susanna Kearsley
#25. There are times when our victories have a cost that we did not foresee, when winning brings us loss.
Susanna Kearsley
#26. Well, it was over now, I thought. Time everyone forgot, forgave, let be.
Susanna Kearsley
#27. How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story.
Susanna Kearsley
#29. When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.
Susanna Kearsley
#30. Edmund had obviously never yet experienced the speed with which news traveled round the docklands. "Is there anyone who does not know him?" "All
Susanna Kearsley
#32. Tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories.
Susanna Kearsley
#33. Because it is in giving of ourselves and our possessions that we best please God; by actions, not words. And all men do deserve a chance to earn God's grace.
Susanna Kearsley
#34. I was born in the city of Brantford, Ontario, Canada - but by the time I'd left high school, I'd moved seven times with my family, my father's engineering work taking us to places as far-flung as Bay City, Texas, and Wolnae-Ri in South Korea.
Susanna Kearsley
#35. It winna dee ye ony good, it disna ring. The salt fae the sea ruins the wiring, fast as I fix it. Besides,' said the man, as he came up to join us, 'I'm nae in the hoose tae be hearin ye, am I?
Susanna Kearsley
#36. No matter what the bards may say, there's no romance in dying for a man.
Susanna Kearsley
#38. Even a writer like me, who, in 'The Firebird,' is telling the story of people who've been dead for nearly three centuries, needs to take care. Those people may not be around any longer to tell me what actually happened, but neither are they able to defend themselves against unjust portrayals.
Susanna Kearsley
#39. I had met death before, in different forms
I knew quite well the pattern of my grieving. First came shock, and then tears, and then a bitter anger, followed by a softer grief that time would wear away.
Susanna Kearsley
#40. Daddy could be rather difficult, at times, and he hadn't yet found any young man who measured up to his exacting standards. The best thing, I'd found, was simply not to introduce them to him. It saved a lot of bother, all around.
Susanna Kearsley
#41. Sometimes, the scales of justice find a level of their own, without our help ... And sometimes, in seeking justice, we don't always serve it.
Susanna Kearsley
#43. The road does rarely welcome us, preferring we should stay at home, but I have found the remedy is simply then to move my home itself to other places, and so gain a different view.
Susanna Kearsley
#44. You hold your life cheaply, mistress," the voice said dryly. "He's a bad-tempered devil, and his affections are often false." "Nonsense," I said. "He's a lovely brute.
Susanna Kearsley
#45. Knowing that the battle will not end the way he wishes does not make it any less worthwhile the fight.
Susanna Kearsley
#46. If it hadn't been for Bill Macdonald's book 'The True Intrepid,' I might never have found out about the women who went down to work in secret in New York for our own spymaster Sir William Stephenson in the Second World War.
Susanna Kearsley
#47. Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.
Susanna Kearsley
#48. It was a thing intangible, yet clearly felt - the sense that time was moving round him, past him, leaving him untouched.
Susanna Kearsley
#49. One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.
Susanna Kearsley
#50. That's how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.
Susanna Kearsley
#51. Into the air. There was love here - not perfect, but strong,
Susanna Kearsley
#52. The face is a plain one," said Hugh, "but the workings inside will not fail ye.
Susanna Kearsley
#53. Some men prayed for life and some for death, in languages as varied as their uniforms - the Dutch and Germans and the Scots and French and English tangled side by side, for all men looked alike when they were dying.
Susanna Kearsley
#54. The secret to keeping one's actions concealed from the enemy is, in most cases, to learn what he thinks you will do, and then seem to be doing it, for that is what he'll believe
Susanna Kearsley
#55. Mary could have told him that it was no use, that she had called her father back and it had made no difference, that if something once desired to leave you it was lost already and forever.
Susanna Kearsley
#56. Hindsight, I thought, was like a punishment, remorseless in its clarity and painfully unable to change what had gone before.
Susanna Kearsley
#58. Such is the endless dilemma of dialect. Not every reader will ever agree with the way that I handle it, no matter how hard I work to keep everything readable. But again it's that balance I have to maintain between keeping it easy and keeping it real, and I know that I'll never please everyone.
Susanna Kearsley
#60. Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don't blame them. I've read books myself that I've had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache.
Susanna Kearsley
#61. And how is dear Patrick the Protester? What's he on about this week? Saving the dormice? Blocking the bypass?" "Battling the logging industry, actually. Chaining himself to trees. But only at the weekend," I explained. "He doesn't have so much free time, now he's married." "Ah.
Susanna Kearsley
#62. My children are as at home in the Port Elgin library as I used to be, and they've sat in the cinema seats where I sat with their aunt every Saturday afternoon, watching the matinee movies.
Susanna Kearsley
#63. And does he like blondes, as well?'
Rob laughed. I had forgotten just how great a laugh he had. 'No, he prefers, dark haired women. You've nothing to fear from the Sentinel, Nicola.
Susanna Kearsley
#64. The strongest soldier cannot balance long upon the blade that does divide his honor and his heart, and whatever way he falls, the cut will kill him.
Susanna Kearsley
#66. The firebird drops a feather, was his summary, and if you're fool enough to pick it up and chase the bird itself, you're in for trouble.
Susanna Kearsley
#67. It's the pursuit of love and happiness that is the driving force of the romantic novel.
Susanna Kearsley
#68. So, you see, my heart is held forever by this place," she said. "I cannot leave.
Susanna Kearsley
#70. I grew up in a very small town where nearly everyone knew each other, and odds were that whatever you said about a person would make it back to them by nightfall - something incomers learned, to their frequent embarrassment.
Susanna Kearsley
#71. I'm sure it was a good house in its time as well, but sometimes what is left behind when something has been lost is even better than the thing that came before.
Susanna Kearsley
#72. You want to watch him, Julia," he told me. "He may look harmless enough, but appearances can be deceiving." Geoff grinned. "That's slander, that is. You know I always behave like a perfect gentleman." "Right then, Sir Galahad," Iain said dryly.
Susanna Kearsley
#73. A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.
Susanna Kearsley
#74. If it is true that men have souls that do survive them," he went on, ignoring me, "and if those souls are born again to life, you need not worry that my ghost will haunt you. I'll haunt you in the flesh, instead.
Susanna Kearsley
#75. Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it.
Susanna Kearsley
#76. The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'
Susanna Kearsley
#78. The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.
Susanna Kearsley
#79. The world becomes a wider place, with but a little learning.
Susanna Kearsley
#80. I can have my day carefully planned, but if someone wakes up with a cough or a sniffle, then everything changes. Thinking quickly and adapting without grumbling are essential skills to learn, in my opinion.
Susanna Kearsley
#81. David McClelland was changed by that day more than most men.
Susanna Kearsley
#82. It's the only thing I begrudge the rich," I said, as I followed him back down the damp-smelling staircase to the ground floor.
"What's that?"
"Their ability to buy books that the rest of us can never hope to own.
Susanna Kearsley
#83. Ever try to hold a butterfly? It can't be done. You damage them, he said. 'As gentle as you try to be, you take the powder from their wings and they won't ever fly the same. It's kinder to let them go.
Susanna Kearsley
#84. But what you bring back with you in the end, he said, might not be what you started out in search of to begin with
Susanna Kearsley
#85. Tis action moves the world ... [in] the game of chess, mind that: ye cannot leave your men to stand unmoving on the board and hope to win. A soldier must first step upon the battlefield if does mean to cross it.
Susanna Kearsley
#86. It's too easy, you see, to get trapped in the past. The past is very seductive. People always talk about the mists of time, you know, but really it's the present that's in a mist, uncertain. The past is quite clear, and warm, and comforting. That's why people often get stuck there.
Susanna Kearsley
#88. As a former waitress myself, I know firsthand how a simple smile from someone can improve your day and how a single harsh word can destroy it. Being courteous and thoughtful costs you nothing and can sometimes pay you dividends in unexpected ways.
Susanna Kearsley
#90. You couldn't have picked a better time," I assured him warmly. "It'll do wonders for my image. By teatime it'll be all over town that I'm related to a vicar." "Or that you're having an affair with one." Tom grinned. "Village people have terribly suspicious minds, you know.
Susanna Kearsley
#91. There was no DVR, no Netflix, and no binge-watching. We didn't even have a VCR till I was nearly out of high school.
Susanna Kearsley
#93. D'you think I'd let a little thing like the grave come between us?
-Richard
Susanna Kearsley
#94. When you say that you write romantic fiction, there are a lot of people who have an image in their mind of the 'bodice ripper.' It's the one term that most romantic fiction writers absolutely hate because it has no bearing on what people are writing.
Susanna Kearsley
#95. For if there was no winter, we could never hope for spring.
Susanna Kearsley
#96. Ye'll learn more of a man if ye look at his face when he's looking at somebody else, than ye'll learn any other way, but,' he advised her, 'ye have to keep silent to do it
Susanna Kearsley
#97. Tis the curse of a woman of influence that she must always be reckoned unvirtuous.
Susanna Kearsley
#98. She'd looked at herself with a sigh, having hoped her reflection would show something more than the road-weary waif who sighed back at her, bright curls disheveled and darkened by dust, pale eyes reddened and circled by shadows of sleeplessness.
Susanna Kearsley
#99. I curled my hand against his chest and he covered it with his own, smoothing the hair back from my forehead. "Sleep," he told me. "There are a few more hours of daylight yet, that we may call our own.
Susanna Kearsley
#100. When all the world is old, lad, And all the trees are brown; And all the sport is stale, lad, And all the wheels run down, Creep home and take your place there, The spent and maimed among: God grant you find one face there You loved when all was young.
Susanna Kearsley
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