Maggie Stiefvater Quotes

Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

It's easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their past, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often then not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.

Me releasing my music, if anything, is an opportunity to show the world my stories and tell the world my stories.

There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.

You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.

People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.

Scars are souvenirs you never lose, the past is never far, did you lose yourself somewhere out there, did you get to be a star, and don't it make you sad to know that life is more than who you are?

Past tears are present strength.

The past was so past it hurt.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.

Quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.

What was it with me and organized beatings, anyway?

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

Far too often, when we think we are frightened by mystery, the fact is that we are haunted by history.

Forgiveness isn’t my best thing. Easier staying pissed. But I’m tired of being pissed all the time. Tired of feeling hurt by stuff that can never be fixed because it is an indelible part of the past.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.

It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

We didn't talk about our scars, the ones you could see and the ones you couldn't.

Mean people are really just sad people. They hurt others because they are hurting. Every person is born beautiful, and much of the ugliness in others was put inside of them by other hurting people.

I would love to work with Ron Howard. I think he is brilliant. I love the stories that he chooses. Theyre always very personal and intense. He loves a lot of emotion, and hes so well equipped to pull all of that out of the actors. I really love that kind of thing and I think thats what movies should be about.

The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.

My God", he whispered. What have I done to her? He thought, humbled. The spell was broken, but it wasn't sealed, and her soul was bare to him, the scars of her tragic past and her triumphs over pain and her aching need to find her place. He just wanted to hold her to him and tell her it would be okay, that she had survived and was beautiful.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.