Jeff Zentner > Quotes

“If you're going to live, you might as well do painful, brave, and beautiful things.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“For the most part, you don't hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“Nothing makes you feel more naked than someone identifying a desire you never knew you possessed.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“She's it. She's my everything. She's the standard by which I'll judge beauty for the rest of my life. I'll measure every touch to her breath on my skin. Every voice to her voice. Every mind to her mind. My measure of perfection. The name carved into me. If I could, I would lie with her under these stars until my heart burst.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“I sometimes look at my bookshelf now and think about how someday I'm going to die without ever reading a lot of the books there. And one might be life-changingly good and I'll never know.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“That wouldn't be a bad way to die...giving off light for millions of years after you're gone.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“I've made books my life because they let me escape this world of cruelty and savagery.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“Funny how people move through this world leaving little pieces of their story with the people they meet, for them to carry. Makes you wonder what'd happen if all those people put their puzzle pieces together.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“Writing is something that you can learn only by doing. To become a writer, you need an imagination, which you clearly have. You need to read books, which you clearly do. And you need to write, which you don't yet do, but should.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“So when I watch trains, it makes me think about how much movement there is in the world. How every train has dozens of cars and every car has hundreds of parts, and all those parts and cars work day after day. And then there are all these other motions. People are born and die. Seasons change. Rivers flow to the sea. Earth circles the sun and the moon circles Earth. Everything whirring and spinning toward something. And I get to be part of it for a little while, the way I get to watch a train for a minute or two, and then it's gone.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“I want you to be careful in this world. My heart is wrapped up in you.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“Sometimes, though, you want to remember every minute you spent with someone. You want to remember even the most mundane moments. You wish you had inhabited them more completely, and marked them with yourself more indelibly - not in spite of their ordinariness, but because of it. But you only discover this when it's too late”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“What you call pride, I call courage.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“Our memories of our loved ones are the pearl we form around the grain of grief that causes us pain.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“You’ll never regret a decision more than the one you make out of fear. Fear tells you to make your life small. Fear tells you to think small. Fear tells you to be small-hearted. Fear seeks to preserve itself, and the bigger you let your life and perspective and heart get, the less air you give fear to survive.”
― Jeff Zentner, In the Wild Light

“People live quiet lives and that's okay. There's dignity in that, no matter what you may think.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“Grief is weird. It seems to come in these waves out of nowhere. One minute I'm standing in the ocean, fine. The next minute I'm drowning.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“There comes a point when you realize that you can never make someone like you, or even stop hating you, and the only defense you have left is the ultimate one--not giving a shit anymore.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“You are not a creature of grief. You are not a congregation of wounds. You are not the sum of your losses. Your skin is not your scars. Your life is yours, and it can be new and wondrous. Remember that.”
― Jeff Zentner, In the Wild Light

“We live in a series of moments and seasons and sense memories, strung end to end to form a sort of story.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“The worst days spent with her were better than the best days spent without her.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“Be honest. Be humble. Listen more than you talk.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“Some fall in glorious ways. One green fields of battle as old warriors, surrounded by friends, fighting for their homes, fighting cruelty.

Some fall crawling in the dirt of Forrestville, Tennessee, in the dark, impossibly young and alone, for no good reason at all.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“Nothing stops when we’re gone,” Lydia said. “The seasons don’t stop. This river doesn’t stop. Vultures will keep flying in circles. The lives of the people we love won’t stop. Time keeps unspooling. Stories keep getting written.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“This is what you remember of the people you love when they're gone—the ways they knew you that no one else did—even you. In that way, their passing is a death of a piece of yourself.”
― Jeff Zentner, In the Wild Light

“How is it every time we're talking about the real world, you manage to bring up fantasy, and every time we're talking about fantasy, you manage to bring up the real world?

Travis shrugged. "My fantasies are more interesting than the real world and machines and tools are more interesting than you guys' fantasies.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“You're never safe from yourself. Your own blood will poison you.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“Wanting to believe something is powerful”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“I’m tired of watching children perish. I’m tired of watching the world grind up gentle people. I’m tired of outliving those I shouldn’t be outliving. I’ve made books my life because they let me escape this world of cruelty and savagery. I needed to say that out loud to somebody other than my cats. Please take care of yourselves, my young friends.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“Funny how people move through this world leaving little pieces of their story with the people they meet, for them to carry.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days