Nicholas Sparks Quotes

“It’s just that sometimes, our future is dictated by what we are, as opposed to what we want.”

“Everyone has a past, but that’s just it—it’s in the past. You can learn from it, but you can’t change it.”

“I wish I could give you what you’re looking for, but I don’t know what it is. There’s a part of you that you keep closed off from everyone, including me. It’s as if I’m not the one you’re really with. You mind is on someone else.”

“Tough toenails, tiger. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.”

“Without another word they came together, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and he put his arms around her, drawing her close.”

“Dreams are always crushing when they don’t come true. But it’s the simple dreams that are often the most painful because they seem so personal, so reasonable, so attainable. You’re always close enough to touch, but never quite close enough to hold and it’s enough to break your heart.”

“There is sickness rolling through my body; I’m neither strong nor healthy, and my days are spent like an old party balloon: listless, spongy and growing softer over time.”

“It wasn’t Noah she loved; she loved what they had once been. Besides, it was normal to feel that way. Her first real love, the only man she’d ever been with - how could she expect to forget him?”

“Relationships are the most important thing in life, and friends are a part of that.”

“‘Trust people,’ he would tell me, ‘until they give you a reason not to. And then never turn your back.‘”

“That’s the thing about being the product of happily married parents. You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you’re entitled to live it.”

“You always have a choice. It’s just that some people make the wrong one.”

“When you chase a dream, you learn about yourself. You learn your capabilities and limitations, and the value of hard work and persistence.”

“If we’d never met, I think I would have known that my life wasn’t complete. And I would have wandered the world in search of you, even if I didn’t know who I was looking for.”

“If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.”

“People come, people go—they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.”

“Love, after all, always said more about those who felt it than it did about the ones they loved.”

“Never forget that anticipation is an important part of life. Work’s important, family’s important, but without excitement, you have nothing. You’re cheating yourself if you refuse to enjoy what’s coming.”

“Loving someone and having them love you back is the most precious thing in the world.”

“Noah is also left with the belief that miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things.”

“She wanted something else, something different, something more. Passion and romance, perhaps, or maybe quiet conversations in candlelit rooms, or perhaps something as simple as not being second.”

“The past can be escaped only by embracing something better, and he figured that was what she’d done.”

“When the lump in his throat subsided, he whispered to her, ‘You are the answer to every prayer I’ve offered. You are a song, a dream, a whisper, and I don’t know how I could have lived without you for as long as I have. I love you, Allie, more than you can ever imagine. I always have, and I always will.‘”

“Denial is an ugly thing.”

“I don’t pray because it doesn’t work. Prayer doesn’t fix anything. Bad things happen anyway.”

“My mom used to tell me that whatever you do, marry someone who loves you more than you love him.”

“Under normal circumstances, Ronnie probably would have appreciated an evening like this. In New York, the lights from the city made it impossible to see many stars, but here, it was just the opposite.”

“Now it was coming to an end, and it was like he was watching the last flicker of light wink out in the darkness of an endless tunnel.”

“Change isn’t always for the best.”

“Oh Noah...I’ve missed you.”

“Were all first loves like that? Somehow she doubted it; even now it struck her as being more real than anything she’d ever known. Sometimes it saddened her to think that she’d never experience that kind of feeling again, but then life had a way of stamping out that intensity of passion; she’d learned all too well that love wasn’t always enough.”

“I want to wake up with you beside me in the mornings. I want to spend my evenings looking at you across the dinner table. I want to share every mundane detail of my day with you and hear every detail of yours. I want to laugh with you and fall asleep with you in my arms.”

“That’s why I loved being with you. We could do the simplest things, like toss starfish into the ocean and share a burger and talk and even then I knew that I was fortunate. Because you were the first guy who wasn’t constantly trying to impress me. You accepted who you were, but more than that, you accepted me for me. And nothing else mattered-- not my family or your family or anyone else in the world. It was just us.”

“Noah has fallen in love with the new Allie, not her memory, but then he had never really stopped, and this he realizes, is his destiny.”

″. . . the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. What the younger generation didn’t understand was that the grass was greenest where it’s watered.”

“‘Because you aren’t just someone I loved back then. You were my best friend, my best self, and I can’t imagine giving that up again.’ He hesitated searching for the right words. ‘You might not understand, but I gave you the best of me, and after you left, nothing was ever the same.’”

“And suddenly she knew exactly why Catherine had fallen in love with him. It wasn’t that he was unusually attractive, or ambitious, or even charming. He was partly those things, but more important, he seemed to live life on his own terms.”

“She understood then, with the distance that maturity brings, how much he’d loved her back then. And still did, something whispered inside her, and all at once she had the strange impression that everything they’d shared in the past had been the opening chapters in a book with a conclusion that had yet to be written.”

“You’re still alive. And that means you’ll love and be loved...and in the end, nothing else really matters.”

“At night, when I am alone, I call for you, and whenever my ache seems to be the greatest, you still seem to find a way to return to me.”

“If you like her, if she makes you happy, and if you feel like you know her--then don’t let her go.”

“As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn’t exist.”

“I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless them, and I find myself wondering why--out of all the people in all the world I could ever have loved--I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as happy as I did that day, but then again, it was always like that when we were together. I never wanted it to end.”

“Someday you’ll find someone special again. People who’ve been in love once usually do. It’s in their nature.”

“Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go. ”

“I know that somehow, every step I took since the moment I could walk was a step towards finding you.”

“True love is rare, and it’s the only thing that gives life real meaning.”

“Things changed, people changed, and the world went rolling along right outside the window.”

“If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been.”

“This is not a goodbye, my darling, this is a thank you.”

“But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing.”

“Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.”

“Theresa, I know there’s a part of you that believes you can change someone, but the reality is that you can’t. You can change yourself, and Garrett can change himself, but you can’t do it for him.”

“If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it.”

“The ocean has been singing to me, and the song is that of our life together.”

“It’s impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.”

“I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.”

“She was everything I wanted. She was beautiful and charming, with a quick sense of humor, and she supported me in everything I did.”

“Life passes by now like the scenery outside a car window. I breathe and eat and sleep as I always did, but there seems to be no great purpose in my life that requires active participation on my part...I do not know where I am going or when I will get there.”

“It is at moments like these that I know my what my purpose is in life. I am here to love you, to hold you in my arms, to protect you. I am here to learn from you and to receive your love in return. I am here because there is no other place to be.”

“Love is Love no matter old you are, and I knew if I gave you enough time, you’d come back to me.”

“There are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one’s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore.”

“That initial anger she had felt turned to sadness, and now it had become something else, almost a dullness of sorts. Even though she was constantly in motion, it seemed as if nothing special ever happened to her anymore. Each day seemed exactly like the last, and she had trouble differentiating among them.”

“You are, and always have been, my dream.”

“I didn’t plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if you planned on falling in love with me. But once we met, it was clear that neither of us could control what was happening to us. We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created.”

“My daddy said, that the first time you fall in love, it changes you forever and no matter how hard you try, that feeling just never goes away.”

“Every great love starts with a great story. . .”

“I love you. I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope, and every dream I’ve ever had, and no matter what happens to us in the future, everyday we are together is the greatest day of my life. I will always be yours. ”

“The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we’ve lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we’ve found each other. And maybe each time, we’ve been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both a goodbye for the past ten thousand years and a prelude to what will come.”

“In time, the hurt began to fade and it was easier to just let it go. At least I thought it was. But in every boy I met in the next few years, I found myself looking for you, and when the feelings got too strong, I’d write you another letter. But I never sent them for fear of what I might find. By then, you’d gone on with your life and I didn’t want to think about you loving someone else. I wanted to remember us like we were that summer. I didn’t ever want to lose that.”

“You can’t live your life for other people. You’ve got to do what’s right for you, even if it hurts some people you love.”

“Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can’t control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense.”

“I’m not saying it because I’m sweet. I’m saying it because I love you now and I always have. More than you can imagine.”

“Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel I remember wondering to be always together yet forever apart?”

“We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.”

“I am nothing special; of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.”

“You are my best friend as well as my lover, and I do not know which side of you I enjoy the most. I treasure each side, just as I have treasured our life together.”

“In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life.”

“It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone had to make. In every way, a walk to remember.”

“With Jamie, everything was in the Lord’s plan . . . She always mentioned the Lord’s plan whenever you talked to her, no matter what the subject. The baseball game’s rained out? Must be the Lord’s plan to prevent something worse from happening. A surprise trigonometry quiz that everyone in class fails? Must be in the Lord’s plan to give us challenges.”

“The next day I spent fourteen hours memorizing my lines, cursing my friends, and wondering how my life had spun so out of control.”

“My breathing suddenly went still. I looked at Jamie, then up to the ceiling and around the room, doing my best to keep my composure, then back to Jamie again. She smiled at me and I smiled at her and all I could do was wonder how I’d ever fallen in love with a girl like Jamie Sullivan.”

“I began to pray for a miracle.”

“Without suffering, there’d be no compassion.”

“Though I was probably the richest kid in school, I was by no means the most popular.”

“There’s one thing I still haven’t told you: I now believe, by the way, that miracles can happen.”

“Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.”

“‘I want to get married,” she said quietly. ‘And when I do, I want my father to walk me down the aisle and I want everyone I know to be there. I want the church bursting with people.’”

“Life, I’ve learned, is never fair. If people teach anything in school, that should be it.”

“Jamie helped everyone—she was one of those equal opportunity saints.”

“I held her close to me with my eyes closed, wondering if anything in my life had ever been this perfect and knowing at the same time that it hadn’t. I was in love, and the feeling was even more wonderful than I ever imagined it could be.”

“First you will smile, and then you will cry—don’t say you haven’t been warned.”

“You have to promise that you won’t fall in love with me.”

“I’m dying, Landon.”

“Do you ever wonder why things have to turn out the way they do?”

“In my mind, it was the first time that God had ever spoken directly to me, and I knew with certainty that I wasn’t going to disobey.”

“In front of God and everyone else, I’d promised my love and devotion. In sickness and in health, and I’d never felt so good about anything. It was, I remember, the most wonderful moment of my life.”

“When I was seventeen, my life changed forever.”

“Romance is thinking about your significant other when you are supposed to be thinking about something else.”

“How far should a person go in the name of true love?”

“He often felt that too many people lived their lives acting and pretending, wearing masks and losing themselves in the process.”

“He felt as though he were failing in practically every area of his life. Lately, happiness seemed as distant and unattainable to him as space travel. He hadn’t always felt this way. There had been a long period of time during which he remembered being very happy. But things change. People change. Change was one of the inevitable laws of nature, exacting its toll on people’s lives. Mistakes are made, regrets form, and all that was left were repercussions that made something as simple as rising from the bed seem almost laborious. ”

“You gotta know when to be lazy. Done correctly, it’s an art form that benefits everyone.”

“I love you, Gabby, more than you’ll ever know. You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a wife. You’re every hope and every dream I’ve ever had, and you’ve made me happier than any man could possibly be. I don’t ever want to give that up. I can’t.”

“A moment later, he plopped down on the sand beside her, and when they accidentally touched, Gabby had the briefest flash of them sitting together just like this on a hundred different weekends in the future.”

“Marriage, each of them realized intuitively, was about compromise and forgiveness. It was about balance, where one person complemented the other.”

“There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible.”

“Staring at the stars was like staring backward in time, since some stars are so far away that their light takes millions of years just to reach us. That we see stars not as they look now, but as they were when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole concept just struck me as…amazing somehow.”

“He leaned closer, their faces drawing near, and he could feel the heat of her breath mingling with his. He closed his eyes against the memory of a thousand other kisses and touched his lips to hers. He felt a kind of spark, and all at once he felt her slowly coming back to him. She was the arm that held him close in times of trouble, she was the whisper on the pillow beside him at night.”

“How far would you go to keep the hope of love alive?”

“Spending time with you showed me what I’ve been missing in my life.”

“He’d lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.”

“Stories are as unique as the people who tell them, and the best stories are in which the ending is a surprise.”

“It was just a normal day, a day like any other. But most of all it was a day in which everything was exactly the way it should be.”

“Love is a wonderful thing. It makes life worthwhile. I love being in love.”

“The two of you, there’s something uncanny about the way you two are with each other. I mean everything--the way you look at each other, the way she relaxes when you put your hand on her back, the way you both seem to know what the other is always thinking, it’s always struck me as extraordinary. That’s another reason I keep putting marriage off. I know I want something like what you two share, and I’m not sure I’ve found it yet. I’m not sure I ever will. And with love like that, they say anything’s possible, right?”

“The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present…yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.”

“‘I got the sense that he was the kind of person who couldn’t hold anger for more than a few minutes, because it just wasn’t in him. It could never grow into resentment or bitterness, and I knew then that he was the kind of man who would be married forever. And I decided then and there that I should be the one to marry him.’”

“Three marines made a fire team, three fire teams made a squad, three squads made a platoon, three platoons made a company, three companies made a battalion, and three battalions made a regiment.”

“Teaches them that even though people are left behind, new ones will inevitable take their place; that every place has something good - and bad - to offer.”

“‘There is nothing like love. You should try it.’ Thibault shrugged. ‘Maybe one day.’”

“Sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people.”

“Stick two different people with two different sets of expectations under one rood and it ain’t always going to be shrimp and grits on Easter.”

“Always stick to the story. It was when you started backtracking that people got in trouble. Interrogation 101.”

“Based on her experience with men, most assumed that when you talked to them about a problem or dilemma, they were expected to offer an opinion, even when all you wanted was for them to listen.”

“He closed his eyes as she put her head on his shoulder, and in that instant, nothing else mattered. Not the song, not the place, not the other couples around him. Only this, only her. He gave himself over to the feel of her body as it pressed against him, and they moved slowly in small circles on the sawdust-strewn floor, lost in a world that felt as though it had been created for just the two of them.”

“Proximity bred familiarity, and familiarity bred comfort.”

“He could imagine some people thinking that he was walking to outpace the memories of the world he’d left behind...”

“‘Because every now and then, I’d meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I’d stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later, he always acted like I had the plague. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. And it bothered me. It hurt me. With time, it got harder and harder to keep blaming the guys, and I eventually came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with me. That maybe I was simply meant to live my life alone.’”

“She had been proud of his decision to serve his country, her heart bursting with love and admiration the first time she saw him outfitted in his dress blues.”

“He completed her in a way that she’d never thought possible. Knowledge isn’t everything, she told herself, and she knew then that, in Nana’s words, he was the toast to her butter.”

“It was easy to idealize someone you barely knew.”

“Good and bad, strengths and faults, he was hers forever.”

″‘Most people don’t know how to appreciate silence. They can’t help talking.”

“‘I love you Elizabeth... and more than that, I like you. I enjoy spending time with you.’”

“I knew it wasn’t fair, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t help it. And after a while, the anger I felt just sort of became part of me, like it was the only way I knew how to handle the grief. I didn’t like who I’d become, but I was stuck in this horrible cycle of questions and blame.”

“‘He was a wonderful man. And when a man is that special, you know it sooner than you think possible. You recognize it instinctively, and you’re certain that no matter what happens, there will never be another one like him.’”

“He stared back at her, knowing with certainty that he was falling in love. He pulled her close and kissed her beneath a blanket of stars, wondering ho on earth he’d been lucky enough to find her.”

″‘I don’t hate it here,’ she said automatically. Surprising herself, she realized that as much as she’d been trying to convince herself otherwise, she was telling the truth. ‘It’s just that I don’t belong here.‘”

“I don’t care if your dad is the Sultan of Brunei. You happened to be born into a privileged family. What you do with that truth is completely up to you. I’m here because I want to be with you. But if I didn’t, all the money in the world wouldn’t have changed my feelings for you.”

“It hadn’t been so long ago, yet sometimes she felt that she’d been an altogether different person back then.”

“Every time the light shines through the window we built, or any window at all, you’ll know I’m right there with you, okay? That’s going to be me. I’ll be the light in the window.”

“He finally understood that God’s presence was everywhere, at all times, and was experienced by everyone at one time or another.”

“In profile, he could see both the young woman she was becoming and the little girl he remembered.”

“Even though I wasn’t there when it happened, I think the summer really began with the fire.”

″‘No, sweetie. Just the opposite.’ He rolled his head to face her. ‘I asked you to come so I could watch you live.‘”

“In the end, you should always do the right thing, even if it’s hard.”

“I never stopped loving you, Ronnie. And I never stopped thinking about you. Even if summers do come to an end.”

“Sometimes she wished her father had started her on the electric guitar. Or at the very least, singing lessons. What was she supposed to do with an ability to play the piano?”

″‘I finished your song,’ she said. ‘Our last song.‘”

“I mean talk. Never forget that God is your friend. And like all friends, He longs to hear what’s been happening in your life. Good or bad, whether it’s been full of sorrow or anger, and even when you’re questioning why terrible things have to happen. So I talk with him.”

″... he was ordinary in a world that loved the extraordinary.”

″‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you home.‘”

″... the pieces all fit together. Yet everything was falling apart.”

“Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.”

“No matter how bright your star became, I never cared about the music half as much as I cared about you as a daughter... I want you to know that.”

“It was a myth that every mother and daughter were best friends, but friendship was far less important than family. Friends came and went; family was always there.”

“It takes a long time to grow an old friend, and trust is built a single moment at a time.”

“What the younger generation didn’t understand was that the grass was greenest where it’s watered, which meant that both Frank and Amanda had to get out their hoses if they wanted to make things better. But Amanda hadn’t asked.”

“Life was messy. Always had been and always would be and that was just the way it was, so why bother complaining? You either did something about it or you didn’t, and then you lived with the choice you made.”

“Everyone makes mistakes, even if some are worse than others. Accidents happen.”

“Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She’d believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn’t foresee or even understand, leaving a long trail of regret in its wake. And almost always, those regrets led to the kinds of what if questions that could never be answered.”

“I gave you the best of me, he’d told her once, and with every beat of her son’s heart, she knew he’d done exactly that.”

“There’s a lot of magic between you, ain’t no denying that. And magic makes forgettin’ hard.”

“‘He’ll drag you down, Amanda, but right now you’re too young to understand that.’”

“The world he thought he knew no longer made sense to him, and he began to change.”

″‘I think you should read it, Ruth,’ he said to her. ‘It’s what he wants you to do. Read it aloud, so he can hear you.‘”

“After all, if there is a heaven, we will find each other again, for there is no heaven without you.”

″... having children-creating a family, so to speak- had taken on entirely new significance for her in the wake of her family’s losses.”

“You made me happy and you made me laugh, and if I could do it all over again, I would not hesitate. Look at our life, at the trips we took, the adventures we had. As your father used to say, we shared the longest ride together, this thing called life, and mine has been filled with joy because of you.”

“I love you. I want to be with you. We’ll find a way to make it work.”

“The ups and downs, the dreams and struggles, had all been part of the journey, she realized—a journey that led to a cattle ranch near a town called King, where she had fallen in love with a cowboy named Luke.”

“For it is one thing to declare one’s love for someone and quite another to accept that loving that person requires sacrificing one’s dreams.”

“And you told me you wanted children. That more than anything, you wanted to be a mother.”

“It wasn’t a question of if a bull rider got injured, but rather when and how badly.”

“With you, my life felt indeed like a fantastic adventure-despite our ordinary circumstances, your love imbued everything we did with secret riches.”

“My time on earth is ending and I’m at peace with whatever comes.”

“I miss you this morning just as I have missed you every day for the last nine years. I’m tired of being alone.”

“Do not worry about tomorrow until you have to.”

“People plan, God laughs, or something like that?”

“Yes, I would become upset when you forgot to take out the garbage, but that is not a real argument. That is nothing. It passes like a leaf blown by the window. It is over and done and it is forgotten quickly.”

“I know I’m not going to be able to change the world, but I think it’s important to try to make a difference.”

“This, my darling, is the last letter I will write you. You know what the doctors have told me, you know that I am dying, and that I will not visit Black Mountain in August. And yet, I want you to know that I’m not afraid.”

“Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She’d believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life”

“She wasn’t exactly sure when it happened. Or even when it started. All she knew for sure was that right here and now, she was falling hard and she could only pray that he was feeling the same way.”