The Winter Sea Quotes

“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, The Winter Sea

“..the fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes...and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“So, you see, my heart is held forever by this place," she said. "I cannot leave.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“Men who watch, and say little, very often are much wiser than the men they serve.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant, and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“Ye'll never best your fears until ye face them”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“I do promise that you will survive this. Faith, my own heart is so scattered round the country now, I marvel that it has the strength each day to keep me standing. But it does,' she said, and drawing in a steady breath she pulled back just enough to raise a hand to wipe Sophia's tears. 'It does. And so will yours.'
'How can you be so sure?'
'Because it is a heart, and knows no better.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“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, The Winter Sea

“Hope rarely enters into it. 'Tis action moves the world.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“...a man with eyes the color of the winter sea.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“No matter what the bards may say, there’s no romance in dying for a man.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“A grieving person's like a person treading in deep water--if they've nothing to hold on to, they lose hope. They slide right under.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“I told ye I'd come back to ye.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“For if there was no winter, we could never hope for spring.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“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, The Winter Sea

“Let the devil bar my way, I will come back to ye.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“The man they'd come to see was up and standing at the window with his back to them, so that only Sophia saw his squared stance and his shoulders and the brown hair fastened back above the collar of his shirt. He wore no coat, just breeks and boots, and in the fine white shirt he stood there pale and like a ghost, the only thing of light in that dull room.

He spoke again, not looking round, his voice grown hoarser from the illness. 'Did you ye see her? Was she well?'

'She will be now,' the colnel gently said...

Sophia could not move from where she stood. Could not believe it.

Then he turned, a ghost no longer, but a breathing man. A living man, whose shadowed eyes grew brighter in the grip of hard emotion as he left the window and in two strides crossed to fold her in his arms...”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“It's hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who've been dead three hundred years. They can't come back and tell us, can they?”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“Where’e’er I go, my Soul shall stay with thee: ’Tis but my Shadow that I take away;”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“David McClelland was changed by that day more than most men.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“Watching, I could feel again the stirrings of my characters—the faint, as yet inaudible, suggestion of their voices, and their movements close around me, in the way someone can sense another’s presence in a darkened room. I didn’t need to shut my eyes. They were already fixed, not truly seeing, on the window glass, in that strange writer’s trance that stole upon me when my characters began to speak, and I tried hard to listen.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“Wordlessly I nodded, struck again by all the little intersecting points between the world that I’d created and the world that really was.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“The kiss was brief but left no room for me to misread his intentions. For that swirling moment all I felt was him, his warmth, his touch, his strength. And when he raised his head I rocked a little on my feet off balance. He stood looking down at me as though he'd felt the power of that contact too. Then his teeth flashed white against the darkness of his beard, grey eyes crinkled.

"Put that in your book," he dared me.

And he turned and shoving both hands deep into his pockets walked off whistling down the wet path while I stood behind and watched him, standing speechless in the rain.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“She had well observed that there were roads in life one started down by choice, that led to ends quite different from what might have been if one had chanced to take another turning.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“that might be suitable, the matter had been taken from her hands by the”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“when I came”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“hard-scraping tools, with his sharp-featured face and the mirthless dark eyes that seemed always, whenever”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“He was drifting, I could hear it in his voice. He always fell asleep as easily as some great lazing cat, he only had to close his eyes and moments later he’d be gone, while my own mind kept on whirring round with scattered thoughts and images.”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

“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, The Winter Sea