Susan Howatch Quotes & Sayings

Basically, all novelists should want to tell a story, and if they don't want to, they shouldn't be novelists. I think story-telling is important and underrated. — Susan Howatch

So many people fail to realise that the greatest journey one can ever take is the journey to the very centre of one's being. — Susan Howatch

My first recommendation ... will be that you should have a holiday. You are worn out by all your unhappiness. — Susan Howatch

Lonely, very lonely to have a past no one else can share. — Susan Howatch

And daughters who are so hopeless at doing the done thing and sticking to the rules are automatically paralyzed with guilt whenever they come within fifty yards of a mother like Margaret. — Susan Howatch

Everything in the world is part of a design. Everything has meaning and purpose and a place in the pattern of existence, only it's not always possible to understand what that design is. Only God can understand the design, because he invented it. — Susan Howatch

I was wondering if the scene in the drawing-room had been a triumph or a disaster or merely a chaotic piece of bad taste verging on bathos, but I reflected that the only important question was whether I had communicated my message to my parents. I continued to smoke my cigarette and occasionally I shuddered. I wondered dimly how anyone ever survived their families. — Susan Howatch

There is no timetable for grief," said Bronwen Morgan. "Grief isn't a train which you catch at the station. Grief has its own time, and grief's time is beyond time, and time itself ... isn't very important. — Susan Howatch

Science destroys only the false ideas about religion; the true ideas it complements and explores.) — Susan Howatch

Sin/ alienation is psychological disease which if unhealed can lead to the living hell of lost hopes and blighted lives. — Susan Howatch

What could be more rational than the decision to use my gifts in a way which would most clearly manifest my moral and intellectual convictions?' My — Susan Howatch

I was the Colleen McCullough of 1971. — Susan Howatch

Morality's like mink," I said. "It's great if you can afford it. — Susan Howatch

The rules that apply to line on dry land no longer apply. You're immersed in water, a substance which has the potential to drown you. If you're not accustomed to swimming every instinct tells you to yell in terror and grab the rail at hte side of the pool, but in fact this isn't the way to deal with the problem. You have to make the problem no longer a problem by embracing it--you have to let go of the rail and launch yourself out on the water because once you're swimming...you find the water's stimulating, bracing, even welcoming. So by embracing the chaos instead of shunning it you've opened up a whole new dimension of reality. Father Lewis Hall — Susan Howatch

I can't complain about the way I've been marketed because it's been so successful. — Susan Howatch

The gifts of the Spirit can be recognized by their fruits. — Susan Howatch

If you pursue the truth far enough you always wind up in the land of paradox. You reach a point where the apparent truth divides into two opposing truths and then you have to try to reach beyond them to grasp the ultimate truth, their synthesis. — Susan Howatch

One wonders what would happen in a society in which there were no rules to break. Doubtless everyone would quickly die of boredom. — Susan Howatch

I am a lover of truth; and if you think of truth as being multifaceted and so huge that we human beings can't fully comprehend it, then obviously it makes sense to put all the facts together - to compare disciplines and try to advance the sum of knowledge by exploration and examination. — Susan Howatch

Religion is about integration, about successfully bringing the selfish ego into line with the centre of the personality where God exists, as a divine spark, in every human being. Religion is about helping man to live in harmony with his true self and to become the person God's designed him to be. — Susan Howatch

The advantage of telling the truth is that one is so much more likely to sound convincing. — Susan Howatch

Life's not about the day when you win the prizes - it's about all the days in between. p 255 — Susan Howatch

The sad part was that everything I said was true but I was going about the healing in entirely the wrong way. As I was to be taught later, you can't heal the sick by force-feeding them with ideas they're not ready to accept; you can't cure people by the simple imposition of your will. It's the power of the Holy Spirit that heals, not the power of a would-be wonder-worker trying to play God. — Susan Howatch

Never think God doesn't listen when you tell Him what you want. — Susan Howatch

Its really most remarkable how the human race is so seldom satisfied with what its got. Give a man the world and he's pining for the moon. — Susan Howatch

You've asked enough questions about evil. But you never asked once about love."
So I asked him to tell me about it, but of course his definition lay beyond words. He just went on sitting with me in the dark and taking the weight of my pain. — Susan Howatch

Better to live in the truth, however terrible, than to murder your true self by living a lie. — Susan Howatch

But then I looked in the glass and saw the spy beyond the clergyman, the image beyond the image, and beyond the spy was yet another man, the image beyond the image beyond the image. Reality blurred; fantasy and truth became inextricably intertwined. I told myself I had imagined the distant stranger but as I felt my personality begin to divide I covered my face with my hands. — Susan Howatch

Practice makes perfect and although God did create Adam he was more accomplished when the time came for him to create Eve. — Susan Howatch

No demon can withstand the power of Christ, said my father, repeating the words he had used long ago, and what he meant was that no dissociated mind can withstand the integrating power of the Living God whose spark lies deep in the core of the unconscious mind and who can not only heal the shattered ego but unify the entire personality. — Susan Howatch

If you are a Christian, you want to give as much as you can away. It sounds pious, but it's not a duty; it's a kind of joy. — Susan Howatch

Think of me as the porter ... and consider the possiblity that life might be less exhausting if you unloaded some of your bags on to my empty trolley. — Susan Howatch

There's a pattern. Never, never doubt that there's a pattern. There's a pattern always. Everywhere. In everyone. — Susan Howatch

Sin is when you turn away from God - or, in the other language, alienation occurs when the ego, that erratic, unreliable driver of the personality, temporarily turns aside from the great quest for integration with the inner self, the self that's authentic, the self that contains the potential to be fully human, fully fulfilled and fully alive. — Susan Howatch

It is an author's primary duty to entertain. Sling out all the philosophical terms, but keep the reader turning the page. — Susan Howatch

> ... all I could think was what hell it is for the survivors when death slams into life without warning and smashes every fixed point on the emotional map. — Susan Howatch

You have a right to be angry, but you mustn't turn that anger back on yourself because that only compounds the damage which has already been done. You must turn the anger outwards. — Susan Howatch

It was tremendously exciting to discover that science was not destroying religion, as people popularly believe, but that it could cast light on theism and Christianity. — Susan Howatch

It doesn't do to be sentimental about cats; the best ones don't respect you for it — Susan Howatch

But a show of force by the mightiest nation on earth isn't going to do anything except convince them that their attitudes are worth holding on to. Soon they'll be martyrs and world opinion will think the British Empire nothing but a big bully too fond of waving the big stick. — Susan Howatch