Terry Brooks

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"“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!”"

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

"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!"