Terry Brooks Quotes

#1. Tolkien is considered the grandfather of fantasy and, for me, I consider myself the grandson, with Terry Brooks as the kind of crazy uncle of fantasy, being the one who brought me into it.

Peter V. Brett

#2. We knew Terry Brooks' work, but we hadn't read the Shannara books. So, they sent us the book to read and we just loved the story and the characters. We thought it would make a very compelling season of television. We were like, "Someone is going to make this. Why don't we do it?"

Miles Millar

#3. I didn't really distinguish between genre and not-genre as a kid, until I made the transition to adult fantasy via Terry Brooks.

Marie Brennan

#4. For a variety of reasons, my books struck the marketplace like a thunderclap; and one of those reasons was that there were so few alternatives available. Readers who loved Tolkien, and who were not satisfied by Terry Brooks, had nowhere else to turn.

Stephen R. Donaldson

#5. About Antrax by Terry Brooks: I wonder if he's planning a book called SRS? Or F'lu?

James Nicoll

#6. Sometimes we just have to trust that time and fate will bring us back to where we are supposed to be. Sometimes patience and belief are all we have.

Terry Brooks

#7. What they didn't want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source.

Terry Brooks

#8. What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.

Terry Brooks

#9. trained army. The

Terry Brooks

#10. You spend so much time wondering who you are, don't you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forget that the answers are found mostly inside yourselves.

Terry Brooks

#11. Who would you be but who you are?

Terry Brooks

#12. if you wanted something done, it was never a good idea to rely on others. Others were never as committed to achieving your goals as you were.

Terry Brooks

#13. There are many forms of magic in this world, High Lord. Some come in large packages, some in small. Some work with fire and strength of body and heard ... and some work with revelation.

Terry Brooks

#14. We all struggle with what's right and wrong, Paxon. That's the nature of our lives. We have to figure out what we can live with, and hope that what we do to bring it about doesn't exact a cost that's too high. We have to decide where to draw the line.

Terry Brooks

#15. ...while there was life there was hope.

Terry Brooks

#16. Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination.

Terry Brooks

#17. Evil contained is not evil destroyed.

Terry Brooks

#18. that the wars of the past were slowly being forgotten. Shea believed that one could turn his back on the past and build a new world with the future, never understanding that the future was inextricably tied to the past, an interwoven tapestry of events and ideas that would never be entirely severed.

Terry Brooks

#19. My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

Terry Brooks

#20. I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.

Terry Brooks

#21. Reynolds Lucius Wadsworth III was Waddy's real name, the result of a three-generation tradition of unparalleled cruelty in the naming of first-born boys.

Terry Brooks

#22. What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly.

Terry Brooks

#23. It's better to die in pursuit of your dreams than to live a life without hope.

Terry Brooks

#24. There is much to admire in Peter Brett's writing, and his concept is brilliant. There's action and suspense all the way.

Terry Brooks

#25. My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago.

Terry Brooks

#26. Cats can do whatever they want, whenever they want, without regard to what anyone says or does. Rather like Princesses.

Terry Brooks

#27. You did what you should have done. Accept that sometimes the consequences are harsh and unforeseen. Accept that you cannot always allow for every result. There is nothing wrong in this.

Terry Brooks

#28. The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution.

Terry Brooks

#29. If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

Terry Brooks

#30. Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

Terry Brooks

#31. THE NAME OF THE WIND marks the debut of a writer we would all do well to watch. Patrick Rothfuss has real talent, and his tale of Kvothe is deep and intricate and wondrous.

Terry Brooks

#32. I have learned to do more with less, so you don't see the big books anymore.

Terry Brooks

#33. But your responsibilities are sometimes given you without choice, without consent.

Terry Brooks

#34. I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

Terry Brooks

#35. What do you care?" Arik Siq asked. "Who your people were matters hardly at all. Who they are now is what matters. Who you are." "Your history is sometimes a way of understanding your present," Pan replied. "You are your history.

Terry Brooks

#36. Might have, could have, may have, should have - the haves and have nots reduced to pointless possibilities.

Terry Brooks

#37. Those who committed atrocities always seemed to do so out of a misconceived sense of righteousness and the greater good.

Terry Brooks

#38. Faith, Princess," the Prism Cat repeated. "It is a highly underrated weapon against the dark things in this world.

Terry Brooks

#39. It was the nature of things, of course. Life went on. The best you could do was to hold on to the memories that were important to you, so that even if everyone else forgot, you would remember.

Terry Brooks

#40. Everything changes with time's passage. Only change itself is constant.

Terry Brooks

#41. I would never leave your side for a moment if it were possible. But it is not. It is not in the nature of life that we can be together in all things.

Terry Brooks

#42. But words spoken can never be taken back. They can only be measured for and judged on the strength of their sincerity and need.

Terry Brooks

#43. Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on.

Terry Brooks

#44. Your belief is as important as your physical strength. You need to believe in yourself and in your weapon both. Doubt is the enemy. Hesitation is potentially fatal." Sebec

Terry Brooks

#45. In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives.

Terry Brooks

#46. Miles saw him as a grief-stricken recluse, hiding from the world while he mourned his dead wife. Maybe that was the way everyone saw him. But Annie's death had not created the condition; it had merely emphasized it.

Terry Brooks

#47. Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.

Terry Brooks

#48. [Y]ou have an inner strength that makes it possible for you to do things other people couldn't even begin to think of doing.

Terry Brooks

#49. a kaleidoscopic, fragmented rush of images that exploded out of memory. They careened into her like an avalanche and swept her away,

Terry Brooks

#50. We should not be less than what we are.

Terry Brooks

#51. We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

Terry Brooks

#52. The future was painted on a canvas of infinite reach; it entailed too many connections and joinings. Change one and you changed others. No amount of insight would enable a single individual to decipher it all.

Terry Brooks

#53. The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present. The future I have shown you tonight is not yet fixed. But it is more likely to become so with the passing of every day because nothing is being done to turn it aside. If you would change it, do as I have told you.

Terry Brooks

#54. Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

Terry Brooks

#55. Your past was your heritage and the foundation on which you were built. You couldn't start over. You could only repair and move on.

Terry Brooks

#56. Writers need their writing; they need their imaginary worlds in order to find piece in, or make sense of, the real world.

Terry Brooks

#57. The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

Terry Brooks

#58. A building is a home if the people who inhabit it have memories and love and a place in the world. Otherwise, it is just a building, a shelter against the elements, and it can never be anything more.

Terry Brooks

#59. It wasn't simply his choosing to be alone that kept him that way; it was almost a condition of his existence. The feeling that he was an outsider had always been there.

Terry Brooks

#60. I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too.

Terry Brooks

#61. Nothing is lost that we do not first see as lost. Visions born of fear give birth to our failing.
Visions born of hope give birth to our success.
What is possible lives within us, and it only remains for us to discover it.

Terry Brooks

#62. This search is all about faith. Faith that what's clearly impossible might somehow turn out not to be. Faith that we can do what we never would have thought we could. Faith to keep going when everything tells us we should turn back.

Terry Brooks

#63. Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations.
Their right to be free men,
Their desire to live in peace,
Their courage to seek out truth,
Herein lies the Sword of Shannara.

Terry Brooks

#64. He finished the Cherry Coke, and when the hash arrived he ordered a glass of milk to go with it. He ate the hash and drank the milk without looking up. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Josie Jackson looking at him as she passed down the counter.

Terry Brooks

#65. He wanted to tell himself or maybe even her that he would never understand women, but he had a feeling he wasn't the first man to formulate this opinion and very likely wouldn't be the last and that it really didn't matter anyway.

Terry Brooks

#66. The future is a map drawn in the sand, and the tide can wash it away in a moment.

Terry Brooks

#67. He didn't ask for any of this, did he?" "None of them did, come to that." Logan responded. "But that's what life does to you. It gives you a whole lot of stuff you don't ask for and expects you to deal with it. No complaining, no excuses.

Terry Brooks

#68. There was that sense of abandoning the familiar for the unknown that characterizes all journeys made for the first time.

Terry Brooks

#69. If you are always frightened for yourself you can't act, and then life loses its purpose. You just have to tell yourself that, when you get right down to it, you don't matter all that much.

Terry Brooks

#70. The Golden Compass is one of the best fantasy / adventure stories that I have read. This is a book no one should miss.

Terry Brooks

#71. What kind of world permitted such terrible injustice, where good men were stripped of everything and soulless creatures of malice and hatred survived to glory in their pointless death?

Terry Brooks

#72. We never know what we can be or do until the need is there and we are tested by it.

Terry Brooks

#73. Anyway, that's the past, and what matters is the future. That's how life works, because it's short and precious and kind of doubtful.

Terry Brooks

#74. fueled by a mix of fear and self-recrimination. Nest understood. Bennett was an addict, and she viewed everything that happened as being someone else's fault, all the while thinking deep inside that it was really hers.

Terry Brooks

#75. When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment.

Terry Brooks

#76. The unicorns were the most recognizable magic the fairies possessed, and they sent them to those worlds where belief in the magic was in danger of falling altogether. After all there has to be some belief in magic- however small- for any world to survive.

Terry Brooks

#77. His world was a confusing and treacherously shifting ground, and he did not see that he had any better way to deal with it than simply to keep marching on. It

Terry Brooks

#78. History repeating itself, he thought. Lessons learned long ago so often needed to be learned all over again in the present. It might true here, and he might be the student who was being taught.

Terry Brooks

#79. A reluctance to acknowledge that there may be wisdom in youth would be foolish.

Terry Brooks

#80. I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable.

Terry Brooks

#81. You were guaranteed so little in this life, and so sometimes you took what was offered even though you knew it might end badly.

Terry Brooks

#82. Things change. Life changes. Nothing stays the same.

Terry Brooks

#83. For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.

Terry Brooks

#84. What mattered was removing himself from his present existence in an effort to find his future.

Terry Brooks

#85. Shea, particularly, had passed the point where his chief emotion was fear; now he felt only a sense of numbness that dulled his mind into self-imposed surrender, a robot-like acceptance of the fact that he was being led to the proverbial slaughter.

Terry Brooks

#86. If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

Terry Brooks

#87. Testing of self is a regular part of our own lives, so it seems natural to make it a part of the lives of my characters, as well, albeit on a much different level.

Terry Brooks

#88. On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.

Terry Brooks

#89. Life just swept you along and never took you back to where you had been.

Terry Brooks

#90. We live out our lives as we are meant to live them-with some choice, with some chance, but mostly as a result of the persons we are.

Terry Brooks

#91. Why pretend to be something you're not? If you have to be someone, be someone no one else is.

Terry Brooks

#92. She has her gown nicely in place tonight, doesn't she? Black velvet and sparkles, not a thread left hanging. Clever girl, this city. Even the sky is her friend.

Terry Brooks

#93. You have to trust in who and what you are. You have to trust in the dream you have been given. You have believed in it until now, haven't you?

Terry Brooks

#94. Failure to act in a timely manner can be fatal.

Terry Brooks

#95. Most of all, he needed a challenge - because that was what gave life meaning.

Terry Brooks

#96. A world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and explore.

Terry Brooks

#97. I haven't made up my mind about doing anymore Landover books.

Terry Brooks

#98. but sometimes when you took a chance it was better to hold nothing back and to go all-in. He

Terry Brooks

#99. Either you believed in something or you didn't - you couldn't have it both ways and be honest with yourself.

Terry Brooks

#100. Put the past behind you and the future ahead where they belong and spend your time in the present with the rest of us.

Terry Brooks