227 Quotes by Juliet Marillier

Best face your fears straightaway; putting things off only makes them harder.

This was a familiar feeling, for there were many places in the great forest where you could drink in its energy, become one with its ancient heart. When you were in trouble, you could find your way in these places.

As for religious faith, a lack of it shouldn’t stop us from doing good deeds for their own sake.

Good and bad; shade and sunlight, there’s but a hair’s breath between them. It’s all one in the end.

Only – only that, if you believe the tales, it’s in the nature of our people to go to war and to kill, just as it is to sing and play and tell stories. Perhaps they are two halves of the same whole.

In time, your spirit will be with them again, perhaps in a great, spreading tree that shades the place where your grandchildren play. Maybe in a wide-winged eagle soaring aloft, watching as your dear one spreads her linen on the hawthorns to dry and looks suddenly to the sky, shading her eyes against the sunlight. You will be there, and they will know.

Every ancient tale has truth at its heart,” I said. “That’s what I’ve always believed, anyway. But after years and years of retelling, the shape of those old stories changes. What may once have been simple and easily recognized becomes strange, wondrous and magical. Those are only the trappings of the story. The truth lies beneath those fantastic garments.

She said, a child born at midwinter comes into the world on the shortest day of the year. From that point on, the days stretch out. And so a child born at midwinter walks always toward the light, all his life.

Human memory is a strange thing,” he observed. “How it comes and goes. How sometimes folk tuck the past away so deep they forget it’s there at all. The human mind is full of byways, dead ends, locked chambers. Strongboxes guarding matters too painful to be brought into the light; dusty corners where items considered too trivial are tossed away. You’ll remember one day. And if you do not, perhaps it is no matter.