The Horse Whisperer Quotes

“I guess that’s all forever is...Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“She had seemed to need something from him that he hadn’t been able to give...at last he realized that what she had needed from him was need itself. That he should need her as she needed him.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“It was in America that horses first roamed. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat.

Paintings on the walls of caves showed how. Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.

Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this.

They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Often they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. Some wrought their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed. There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. And those who truly had the gift were wont to guard it wisely, for it was said that he who drove the devil out, might also drive him in. The owner of a horse you calmed might shake your hand then dance around the flames while they burned you in the village square.

For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubles ears, these men were known as Whisperers.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“Knowing is the easy part; saying it out loud is the hard part.”
― nicholas evans, The Horse Whisperer

“But you see Annie, where there's pain, there's still feeling and where there's feeling, there's hope.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“I guess that's all forever is. Just one big long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“Her only shame was that she felt none.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“Seems to me if you talk about these things too much, the magic gets lost and pretty soon talk is all there is. Some things in life just... are.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“They looked at each other and some refraction of the pain in Tom's heart must have shown in his eyes.

Frank said, 'In pretty deep, huh?'

'About as deep as it gets.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“Dancing and riding, it’s the same damn thing. It’s about trust and consent.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“There was death at the beginning as there would be death again at its end. Though whether it was some fleeting shadow of this that passed across the girl’s dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered.

The red glow of her alarm showed it was yet a half hour till the time she had set it to wake her and she lay quite still, not lifting her head, trying to configure the change. It was dark but not as dark as it should be. Across the bedroom, she could clearly make out the dull glint of her riding trophies on cluttered shelves and above them the looming faces of rock stars she had once thought she should care about. She listened. The silence that filled the house was different too, expectant, like the pause between the intake of breath and the uttering of words. Soon there would be the muted roar of the furnace coming alive in the basement and the old farmhouse floorboards would start their ritual creaking complaint. She slipped out from the bedclothes and went to the window.


There was snow. The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“What wanton liars love makes of us.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“It was, she believed, a simple and unassailable fact of life that if a woman went to epic lengths to throw herself on the mercy of a man, the man would not, could not, refuse.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“I guess that’s all forever is,’ his father replied. ‘Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer: The 25th anniversary edition of a classic novel that was made into a beloved film

“plight”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“Annie looked into his eyes with their blood-crazed whites and for the first time in her life knew how one might come to believe in the devil.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“I guess that’s all forever is. One long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he’d struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“I guess that’s all forever is,” his father replied. “Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer