Nicholas Evans > 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

“Sometimes what seems like surrender isn't surrender at all. It's about what's going on in our hearts. About seeing clearly the way life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of not being true to it is far, far greater. ”
― Nicholas Evans

“The imporant things in life never happened by accident. But even with those things that were meant to be, sometimes you had to wait awhile and then maybe give them a little nudge.”
― Nicholas Evans

“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

“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

“I am not gone but merely walk within you.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Smoke Jumper

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

“Look after each other. As a couple. When you have kids, you'll want to put them first. Don't. Marriage is like a plant. To keep it alive you've got to water it and feed it. If you don't, when the kids are gone, you'll look in the corner and it'll be dead.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Divide

“I absolutely think that happiness is a choice. One of the most potent forces in human psychology is the power of habit. Do something, think something, often enough and it will become the only thing you can do or think. Choose to be unhappy and soon that’s all you will be. Live in a swamp and you’ll grow webbed feet.”
― Nicholas Evans

“It's a lot like nuts and bolts - if the rider's nuts, the horse bolts! ”
― Nicholas Evans

“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

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

“No man may earn his heart's desire, lest first he brave the smoke and fire”
― Nicholas Evans, The Smoke Jumper

“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

“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

“The important things in life always happened by accident. At fifteen she didn’t know much, in fact, with each passing year she was a lot less clear about most things. But this much she did know. You could worry yourself sick trying to be a better person, spend a thousand sleepless nights figuring out how to live clean and decent and honest, you could make a plan and bolt it in place, kneel by your bed every night and swear to God you’d stick to it, hell, you could go to church and promise properly. You could cross your heart seven times with your eyes tight shut, cut your thumb and squeeze it and pen solemn vows on a rock with your own blood then throw it in the river at the stroke of midnight. And then, out of the black beyond, like a hawk on a rat, some nameless catastrophe would swoop into your life and turn everything upside down and inside out forever.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Smoke Jumper

“There was death at its beginning as there would be death again at its end.”
― Nicholas Evans

“The important things in life never happened by accident. But even with those things that were meant to be, sometimes you had to wait awhile and then maybe give them a little nudge.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Smoke Jumper

“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

“Of course she is. Hell hath no fury. You're not the only woman scorned. However much you and Ben tell her that it's not about her and that it's just about what went wrong between you and him, she probably can't see it that way. You should have her go talk to somebody.'
'A shrink?'
'Why not? Aren't you seeing someone?'
'I'm not the type.'
'What's the type? You get sick, you see a doctor, right?”
― Nicholas Evans, The Divide

“They drove south with the night falling soft and blue around them. Away to their right the Front Range stood out against the last red ribbon of the dying day like ramparts of some dread empire. Through the open windows came the smell of cooling earth and sage long baked by the sun.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Smoke Jumper

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

“The gist of it was that there were two types of men who absconded from their marriages: the naughty and the needy. The naughty absconder was a simple dick-driven creature who just couldn't help himself. However much he might love his family, it always came second to his main object in life, namely, chasing women. The needy absconder was basically insecure and forever trying to prove to himself how much everybody loved him. His family was, in effect, one big love machine that needed his constant control and attention. When his kids grew older and got lives of their own and didn't need him so much, he suddenly got scared and felt old and useless. So he ran off to look for a new love machine someplace else.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Divide

“Just as they had followed the buffalo across the plains, wolves now followed it, in a few short years, to the brink of extinction.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Loop

“Dr. Henderson made the interesting observation that this was the very same day that North Korea had invaded the South, an event that still looked likely to provoke a third world war, for which Diane would also likely be held responsible.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Brave

“Guilt could be as simple as that. There didn't have to be anything maudlin or self-pitying about it. It was a fact and you lived with the consequences, a kind of contract under which your actions led to inevitable obligations.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Smoke Jumper

“Maybe that's nature's way. Making people you once loved less lovable, so that it won't be so hard when they go.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Divide

“It was hard to get lost in Missoula even if you wanted to. Wherever you were, all you had to do to get your bearings was look around and find the big letter M, embossed in white halfway up the steep shoulder of grass that reared on the south bank of the Clark Fork River. Though only a hill, it was called Mount Sentinel and if you had the legs and lungs and inclination to hike the trail that zigzagged up it, you could stand by the M and gaze out across the town at a travel-brochure shot of forest and mountain dusted from early fall with snow.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Divide

“And I said well luckily I was mature and old enough to take this success at my age. It was bullshit.”
― Nicholas Evans