Cynthia Voigt Quotes & Sayings

On this road they saw some other men, fishers and farmers Elske was told; some of the men were accompanied by women whose hair was wrapped around with colored cloths. These men and women stared at Elske, in her fur boots and wolfskin cloak, but when she stared back and them they looked away. — Cynthia Voigt

Men, and women too, are unpredictable creatures. You have seen little of this. I wonder now if your innocence is enough protection for you. — Cynthia Voigt

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been
Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she
had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances.
For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter
what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way.
And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself.
Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again.
And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right. — Cynthia Voigt

By the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, I moved to New York City and worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. — Cynthia Voigt

But I'll tell you something else, too. Something I've learned, the hard way. I guess" - Gram laughed a little - "I'm the kind of person who has to learn things the hard way. You've got to hold on. Hold on to people. They can get away from you. It's not always going to be fun, but if you don't - hold on - then you lose them. — Cynthia Voigt

It's so great to be able to write from home. My bread is rising downstairs, and I'm upstairs writing. I have a writing room that my grandchildren consider one of their playrooms. — Cynthia Voigt

I wouldn't like to meet her again," Jeff said, "and not in a dark alley." He'd need to be tougher than he ever could be, and it wasn't just this one old lady, it was most people in the world. Jeff felt as if he'd been keeping a secret from himself and had come around a dark inner corner to rediscover it. He felt shaky, but as if he'd learned something. Probably it was good for him. He thought it was. It wasn't good for him to get confident; just like he'd been confident about Melody. It was when you got confident you got taken by surprise and really banged around. — Cynthia Voigt

On a bright Sunday morning in the early years of the last century, — Cynthia Voigt

My writing process often begins with a question. I write down ideas and let them stew for about a year. Then, when I sit down to write, I make a list of characters and try to see how they fit. — Cynthia Voigt

Kids are really tougher than adults, but we tend to forget this in an affluent society that lets kids indulge themselves. — Cynthia Voigt

Where the veil broke, you could see silvery clouds on which tall angels might stand. Not cute little Christmas angels, but high, stern angels in white robes, whose faces were sad and serious from being near God all day and hearing His decisions about the world. — Cynthia Voigt

I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself. — Cynthia Voigt

All I wanted to do was read, to be told stories. Stories were full of excitement and emotions and characters that entertained and often inspired. — Cynthia Voigt

All she knew was that his smile lit up the morning as the rising sun does. For a moment, looking at his face, it was as if her ribs were empty, hollow, as if the world had stopped forever while she looked into his eyes as blue as the bellflowers that grew wild across the meadows. For a moment, just until her beating heart had returned to her chest, Birle had thought she understood everything about herself she had never understood before. — Cynthia Voigt

Jeff had made himself a place, inside himself, a kind of tower room, round, without any windows. In that room, he had locked his memory of the beach on the island, all the memories from the day hours and from the night hours. He had discovered how to step inside that room and slide the curved door closed and bolt it across. — Cynthia Voigt

Orien," Birle protested again.
"You can stay if you must." Orien's cheeks were hollow with hunger and he had little strength for anger. "But I wish you'd come. I don't know how long it would be before I could come back for you."
So she followed him, since he would return for her. — Cynthia Voigt

You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs ... They thought that just because they were smashing eggs they must be making an omelette — Cynthia Voigt

Reading was my hobby, my sport and my activity of choice. It was the prime pleasure of my days, an unfailing escape from whatever realities were distressing me, and the only source of pride I knew, other vanities lying beyond my grasp. I couldn't do anything else well, but I could do words. — Cynthia Voigt

Oriel didn't move. But inside of his head, all was movement, like a river running over rapids, searching for the way through, trying routes around rocks and over shallows, a turbulence of thought more rapid than he could follow. Griff, he knew, would do and say nothing until he heard Oriel's choice. — Cynthia Voigt

I got to thinking - when it was too late - you have to reach out to people. To your family, too. You can't just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough. If you don't care enough, you forget about them, if you can. — Cynthia Voigt

Elske screamed, too. But when Elske screamed, it was the war cry of the Volkaric that came out of her mouth, a howling like the voice of a wolf. The cry wound around the narrow streets as if they were in the wild and merciless northlands. — Cynthia Voigt

I'm not a compulsive writer. I wish I could be compulsive about something. I have no regular writing routine. — Cynthia Voigt

The air in the library rooms was silent, full of ideas, the thinking of the writers of books, the thinking of the readers of books. — Cynthia Voigt

She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls' hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to. — Cynthia Voigt

People can be unimaginably foolish ... and they can be unimaginably grand, at times. — Cynthia Voigt

I felt that the world itself had changed and that it would never be steady under my feet again. I felt I understood nothing of people and had no way to learn. I felt fear.
Until you have felt fear, you cannot imagine it. Once you have really felt it, you know that all your earlier nervousness was but a pale shadow. — Cynthia Voigt

When she asked him to play a song while she finished, he had to strum chords for a while and pretend to be tuning up until he settled down. He didn't want her to see how unsettled he'd been by the whole thing. How unsettled he still was. He had thought he was the fisherman, but he saw now - She had pronged him, with a single stroke, pronged him through the heart and he was caught. Just like with Melody, caught. But this wasn't Melody, Dicey wasn't. And besides, he didn't feel pronged, he felt - overwhelmed, out of breath, breathless. — Cynthia Voigt

You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it? — Cynthia Voigt

When this map was made, there was only empty forest in the south," Gran told Birle.
"Not empty," Granda corrected her. "The forest is never empty. — Cynthia Voigt

When a daring idea first crosses one's mind, if it is to be realized in the future it is often appealing. Then, as the time for its execution comes nearer, one begins to dread that which had once been anticipated. — Cynthia Voigt

Behind the mask Jackaroo wore, there could be a face of bone, its flesh long since eaten away. Jackaroo could fight as a trained soldier, with swords and shield; he could ride a horse like a Lord; and he had the knowledge of letters which only the Lords held. — Cynthia Voigt

I enjoy almost everything I do, perhaps because when I don't enjoy something, I don't do it. I enjoy writing; I enjoy teaching; I enjoy having a family to live among. I am neither a feminist nor an antifeminist, because it seems to me that we are first human beings and after that men and women. Human beings have, so far, proved interesting enough to keep me busy just trying to figure out what might be right and true about them. — Cynthia Voigt

It was almost as if he'd been a ghost in all those rooms, all those days, a ghost in his own life. — Cynthia Voigt

Why doesn't momma come back? — Cynthia Voigt

She couldn't get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn't get away. — Cynthia Voigt

Hiding under the bed doesn't make the worry stop. — Cynthia Voigt

To himself, he called it a safe place, and when they were finally settled in at the end of July, living in the three-room house where windows gave out over the water and woods and sky, he knew he had been right. — Cynthia Voigt

No fish were biting. Not that morning. She heard James calling her with panic in his voice. Slowly, she trudged back to her family. "I told you," Sammy said to James, "because the fishing line was — Cynthia Voigt

Dicey looked out over the tall marsh grasses, blowing in the wind. If the wind blew, the grasses had to bend with it. — Cynthia Voigt

A really good friend, the kind of friend who - when they were together both of them were more able to be who they really were. — Cynthia Voigt

Even after everyone had gone home, the house was filled with the good time they'd had, as if it could linger in the air like the voices and music lingered in memory. Mina wrapped the memory up and put it in her heart; there was a quiet gladness, deep like a tree and tall in her — Cynthia Voigt

Curled up, closed his eyes, and marched himself off, as if sleep were an actual place, like home, like the kitchen - a place a mouse could go to. — Cynthia Voigt

I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don't think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better. — Cynthia Voigt

Ideas, he knew from experience, arrived in their own good time, dressed exactly the way they wanted to be and saying only as much as they felt like. — Cynthia Voigt

If he was a ghost in the life he remembered, Jeff thought, he was also a ghost in his present life, just the same way. Except, in all the fourteen years, just a couple of times. With Melody that first summer he had felt alive. On the beach on the island. And when he played the guitar. Most of the time, he thought, he practiced not being anybody. If you weren't anybody then nobody could - what? Hurt you or leave you behind? Make you unhappy? But then they couldn't make you happy either, could they? If you played it safe, then you kept safe. Jeff figured he was pretty good at keeping safe - he didn't even look in mirrors because he didn't want to see Melody's eyes. But one result of that was that Jeff didn't know anything about himself. And he thought, sitting in the little boat, alone on the creek, alone with the creek and the sky and the marshes, that he might want to know more. — Cynthia Voigt

Mina thought to herself, watching, her momma was the kind of woman she wanted to be, wherever else she got to in her life. — Cynthia Voigt

I'm a big fan of outlining. Here's the theory: If I outline, then I can see the mistakes I'm liable to make. They come out more clearly in the outline than they do in the pages. — Cynthia Voigt

To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books. — Cynthia Voigt

I used to know kids better because I was teaching in a classroom, but I still have a sense of comfort with them. I don't believe that kids have essentially changed. — Cynthia Voigt

Night's darkness cloaked Elske, covering her as the winter snows cover mountains, from peak to foot. Elske moved with the weight of darkness on her shoulders, on her head; and she tasted it in her mouth like the flavorless rills that ran so fast in spring melts. — Cynthia Voigt

He had locked her out of his mind and out of his life. She could no longer get through to him, to make him feel the way she used to. He just wanted to forget about her and the way she played on his feelings - the same way she used to play on the guitar, he thought, remembering for a minute. He knew now just how badly she had played the guitar. — Cynthia Voigt

I do have trouble starting books. I have ideas that I have trouble starting to write. But I'm the kind of person who tends to finish everything she starts out of sheer stubbornness. — Cynthia Voigt

I was no scholar in college, and was arrogant about what I thought. — Cynthia Voigt

You could say that all of life is a series of last chances. — Cynthia Voigt

All work is worth doing well. And there are things to be enjoyed about most jobs ... — Cynthia Voigt

It's never been today before. — Cynthia Voigt

Is there such a thing?' Birle asked.
He looked thoughtfully at her, but not as if he saw her. 'Men have dreamed of it, although none has ever held it in his hand, not to my knowledge. I cannot say that there is such a thing, no. But equally I cannot say there is not. Why should a man be able to dream of it if it cannot be? If it is so impossible, then what put's it into a man's mind? Greed puts many things into men's mind, and fear does too. But men dream of other things, as well
of justice, of the lost golden age, of an order to their world ... of medicine to cure all sickness ... — Cynthia Voigt

People had no more choice than animals about the burdens they carried. — Cynthia Voigt

Rebellion is necessary for development of character. — Cynthia Voigt

The worst things weren't outside of you. — Cynthia Voigt

I was eighteen when I wrote my first book, and I can't remember what it was called. I have no idea where the manuscript is - I lost it when I was twenty-one. — Cynthia Voigt

One day at my grandmother's house, I discovered 'The Secret Garden' and read it. This was the first book I found entirely for myself, and I cherished it. — Cynthia Voigt

Maybe life was like a sea, and all the people were like boats ... Everybody who was born was cast into the sea. Winds would blow them in all directions. Tides would rise and turn, in their own rhythm. And the boats - they just went along as best they could, trying to find a harbor. — Cynthia Voigt

They spent almost four dollars on supper at the mall, and none of them had dessert. They had hamburgers and french fries and, after Dicey thought it over, milkshakes. — Cynthia Voigt

I have the feeling that I know who I am, only I'm not anymore. — Cynthia Voigt

My favorite season was when I wrote every morning for three or four hours, then I would go and teach my classes at school, come home to my family and hang out with them, have dinner, and then, after everyone was tucked in, I would prepare for my classes the next day. — Cynthia Voigt

Mina wanted some of the kind of love Momma gave to her children, where love was the first and deepest thing, and the questions came later and the answers wouldn't matter much measured up against the love. — Cynthia Voigt

When he sat in the rowboat again, the oars ready but not yet dipped into the water to take him away from the island, Jeff looked back. He didn't see the busy land crabs nor the overgrown interior; he saw the beach, knowing it was there just beyond sight, keeping the sight of it clear in his inner eye. He splashed the oars into the water. Behind him, a great blue squawked - Jeff turned his head quickly. The heron rose up from the marsh grass, croaking its displeasure at the disturbance, at Jeff, at all of the world. Its legs dragged briefly in the water before it rose free to swoop over Jeff's head with a whirring of powerful wings. It landed again on the far side of the ruined dock, to stand on stiltlike legs with its long beak pointed toward the water. Just leave me alone, the heron seemed to be saying. Jeff rowed away, down the quiet creek. The bird did not watch him go. — Cynthia Voigt

If I was sure, I'd say. For your Momma, maybe. For all of us, maybe, but I don't think so. I think, maybe, it's reaching out for that school. Somehow. I'm not saying that's what you thought you were doing or what you even wanted to do. But it's how it turned out. And I'm sorry, the way it turned out. Because somebody's slapped your hand back good and hard. But I don't want you to stop reaching, just because it didn't come out the way it should have. — Cynthia Voigt

I love teaching; I love little kids. — Cynthia Voigt

He felt - washed clean, healed. He felt if he could just live here he would be all right. He felt as if he had never been alive before. He felt at ease with himself and as if he had come home to a place where he could be himself, without hiding anything, without pretending even to himself. He felt, thinking his way back up the beach, as if his brain had just woken up from some long sleep, and it wanted to run along beside the waves, to see how far and fast it could go. — Cynthia Voigt

Bullet shrugged. She was right, it would just be another box. It was going to be just another box for him, too, but he'd figured it out. You didn't get out of one box without getting into another, and you didn't get out of one box without getting into another, and you didn't get out without it costing you. For himself, he was just looking for a box that fit him. For her - what he was hoping to do was just loosen a board or two for her. It was up to her what she did about that. — Cynthia Voigt