Terry Brooks citations

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

“There is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who are. They tell what is important. Don't ever be ashamed of them.”

“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.”

“Who would you be but who you are?”

“Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger. Travel too far that road and the way is lost.”

“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.”

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

“Evil contained is not evil destroyed.”

“What you write chooses you.”

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

“If I have the means, I have the responsibility to employ them.”

“We must nurture and love, if life is to have any real meaning. But First we must find a way to survive against the things that prevent us from doing so.”

“You shouldn't believe everything you hear you're young, not stupid.”

“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.”

“I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.”

“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.”

“Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.”

“We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two.”

“What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from… For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endeavors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.”

“You think that Man can start again, do you, Shea? Well you might be quite surprised to learn that some things never change, and that the dangers of power are always present, even to a race that almost obliterated itself.”

“The trick of course was not to go just anywhere, but to go where they might accomplish something useful.”

“Let me tell you something you haven’t learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events—they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn’t have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don’t even notice at first, and then one day it’s there. You wake up and you just don’t have the fire anymore.”

“If you think that Man is free to build a new life while the rest of the world drifts by, then you do not know anything of history!”

“What you need to do is take control of things. Don't wait for events to catch up with you; go and meet them head-on!”

“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.”