A Knight of the Word Quotes

“What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word

“We have thousands and thousands of people living homeless on the streets of our cities at the same time that we have men and women earning millions of dollars a year running companies that make products whose continued usage will ruin our health, our environment, and our values. The irony is incredible. It’s obscene.”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word

“A building is a home if the people who inhabit it have memories and love and a place in the world. Otherwise, it is just a building, a shelter against the elements, and it can never be anything more.”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word

“Things change. Life changes. Nothing stays the same.”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word

“you can be homeless in your heart, too. You can be empty inside yourself because you have no spiritual center. You can wander through life without any real sense of who you are or where you belong. You can exist without purpose or cause.”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word

“Everything changes with time’s passage. Only change itself is constant.”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word

“As a country, as a people, have we changed? On the surface we might appear to have done so, but underneath I think we are still the same. Our change is measurable, but not significant. We remain bent on destroying ourselves. We still kill each other with alarming frequency and for foolish reasons, and we begin the killing at a younger age. We have much to celebrate, but we live in fear and doubt. We are pessimistic about our own lives and the lives of our children. We trust almost no one. “It is the same everywhere. We are a people under siege, walled away from each other and the world, trying to find a safe path through the debris of hate and rage that collects around us. We drive our cars as if they were weapons. We use our children and our friends as if their love and trust were expendable and meaningless. We think of ourselves first and others second. We lie and cheat and steal in little ways, thinking it unimportant, justifying it by telling ourselves that others do it, so it doesn’t matter if we do it, too. We have no patience with the mistakes of others. We have no empathy for their despair. We have no compassion for their misery. Those who roam the streets are not our concern; they are examples of failure and an embarrassment to us. It is best to ignore them. If they are homeless, it is their own fault. They give us nothing but trouble. If they die, at least they will provide us with more space to breathe.” His smile was bitter. “Our war continues, the war we fight with one another, the war we wage against ourselves. It has its champions, good and bad, and sometimes one or the other has the stronger hand. Our place in this war is often defined for us. It is defined for many because they are powerless to choose. They are homeless or destitute. They are a minority of sex or race or religion. They are poor or disenfranchised. They are abused or disabled, physically or mentally, and they have forgotten or never learned how to stand up for themselves.”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word

“Demon stink? On John Ross?”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word

“Good thing it’s all so simple. We can just ignore the culture of poverty. We can just pretend that poor people are just rich people without money. We can tell ourselves that educational, social, and cultural opportunities are the same for everyone. We can ignore the statistics on domestic violence and teen pregnancy and rate of exposure to crime and disease and family stability. Cut off welfare and put ’em to work. I don’t know why anyone didn’t think of it before. We can have everyone off the street and working by the end of the month, I bet.”
― Terry Brooks, A Knight of the Word