Top 280 Alix E. Harrow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.”

— Alix E. Harrow

2. “There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s.”

— Alix E. Harrow

3. “In my life I’ve learned that the people you love will leave you. They will abandon you, disappoint you, betray you, lock you away, and in the end you will be alone, again and always.”

— Alix E. Harrow

4. “Let that be a lesson to you: If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.”

— Alix E. Harrow

5. “Maiden, Mother, and Crone, Guard the bed that I lie on, One to watch, One to pray, One to keep the shadows at bay.”

— Alix E. Harrow

6. “An angry woman is a smart woman.”

— Alix E. Harrow

7. “Most people can’t tell the difference between truthtelling and madness; try it sometime and you’ll see what I mean.”

— Alix E. Harrow

8. “Don’t forget what you are. Everything.”

— Alix E. Harrow

9. “This is the mad Midas touch of true love, which transforms everything it touches to gold.”

— Alix E. Harrow

10. “But photographs, like mirrors, are notorious liars.”

— Alix E. Harrow

11. “Now I was alone, and the only path was the one I left behind me.”

— Alix E. Harrow

12. “Thresholds are dangerous places, neither here nor there, and walking across one is like stepping off the edge of a cliff in the naive faith that you’ll sprout wings halfway down. You can’t hesitate, or doubt. You can’t fear the in-between.”

— Alix E. Harrow

13. “May she wander but always return home, may all her words be written true, may every door lie open before her.”

— Alix E. Harrow

14. “Every story is a love story if you catch it at the right moment.”

— Alix E. Harrow

15. “Doors, he told her, are change, and change is a dangerous necessity. Doors are revolutions and upheavals, uncertainties and mysteries, axis points around which entire worlds can be turned.”

— Alix E. Harrow

16. “It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”

— Alix E. Harrow

17. “True love is not stagnant; it is in fact a door, through which all kinds of miraculous and dangerous things may enter.”

— Alix E. Harrow

18. “There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s. I unwedged the leatherbound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it. I walked through it into another world.”

— Alix E. Harrow

19. “Maybe all powerful men are cowards at heart, because in their hearts they know power is temporary.”

— Alix E. Harrow

20. “I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.”

— Alix E. Harrow

21. “It is fashionable among intellectuals and sophisticates to scoff at true love – to pretend it is nothing but a sweet fairy tale sold to children and young women, to be taken as seriously as magic wands or glass slippers. I feel nothing but pity for these learned persons, because they would not say such foolish things if they had ever experienced love for themselves.”

— Alix E. Harrow

22. “Destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.”

— Alix E. Harrow

23. “They always end up alone in the stories – witches, I mean – living in the woods or mountains or locked in towers. I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and most men are cowards.”

— Alix E. Harrow

24. “When one enters a door, one must be brave enough to see the other side.”

— Alix E. Harrow

25. “Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges.”

— Alix E. Harrow

26. “The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

27. “Second, my long years of research have taught me that all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth.”

— Alix E. Harrow

28. “I felt like an explorer at the precipice of some new, wild world, armed only with ink and hope.”

— Alix E. Harrow

29. “Sentences may alter the weather, and poems might tear down walls. Stories may change the world.”

— Alix E. Harrow

30. “Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy.”

— Alix E. Harrow

31. “I believed in second chances and righted wrongs and rewritten stories.”

— Alix E. Harrow

32. “That afternoon, sitting in that lonely field beside the Door that didn’t lead anywhere, I wanted to write a different kind of story. A true kind of story, something I could crawl into if only I believed it hard enough.”

— Alix E. Harrow

33. “How fitting, that the most terrifying time in my life should require me to do what I do best: escape into a book.”

— Alix E. Harrow

34. “I wanted wide-open horizons and worn shoes and strange constellations spinning above me like midnight riddles. I wanted danger and mystery and adventure.”

— Alix E. Harrow

35. “Perhaps I keep writing because I was raised in a world where words have power, where curves and spirals of ink adorn sails and skin, where a sufficiently talented word-worker might reach out and remake her world. Perhaps I cannot believe words are entirely powerless, even here.”

— Alix E. Harrow

36. “She became something else entirely, something so radiant and while and fierce that a single world could not contain her, and she was obliged to find others.”

— Alix E. Harrow

37. “The point is that I was scared and hurt and alone sometimes but in the end I won. I’m free. And if that’s the price for being free, I’ll pay it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

38. “There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful, who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.”

— Alix E. Harrow

39. “She scoured the Earth, wandering and ravenous, looking for doors. And she found them. She found them in abandoned churches and the salt-rimed walls of caves, in graveyards and behind fluttering curtains in foreign markets. She found so many her imagining of the world grew lacy and tattered with holes, like a mouse-chewed map.”

— Alix E. Harrow

40. “Now I sat in my room, face swollen and eyes dry, teetering on the edge of a pain so vast I couldn’t see its edges. It would swallow me whole, if I let it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

41. “I thought I’d forgotten, but the memories were crisp as photographs. I wondered dispassionately if they’d always been there, lurking just out of sight and whispering their fears to me. If behind every good girl lurked a good threat.”

— Alix E. Harrow

42. “That there were Doors hidden in every shadowed place, waiting to be opened. That a woman might shed her childhood skin, snakelike, and fling herself into the seething unknown.”

— Alix E. Harrow

43. “When I was younger I cried over everything from sneers to sad endings, and even once over a puddle of tadpoles that dried up in the sun, but at some point I learned the trick of stoicism: you hide. You pull yourself inside your castle walls and crank up the drawbridge and watch everything from the tallest tower.”

— Alix E. Harrow

44. “You don’t really know how fragile and fleeting your own voice is, until you watch a rich man take it away as easily as signing a bank loan.”

— Alix E. Harrow

45. “No one really remembers their own origins. Most of us possess a kind of hazy mythology about our early childhood, a set of stories told and retold by our parents, interwoven with our blurred baby memories.”

— Alix E. Harrow

46. “It’s the same bargain we’ve been making for centuries, one way or another: give up your life in order to keep living. Give him your saltwater skin; give him your voice; give him your thousand stories. Give up your body and live forever rooted to the bank of the Big Sandy, dreaming and watching. Do what you can to stay alive.”

— Alix E. Harrow

47. “People never got to stay in their Wonderlands, did they? Alice and Dorothy and the Darlings, all dragged back to the mundane world and tucked into bed by their handlers.”

— Alix E. Harrow

48. “I will not be your leash, my love.”

— Alix E. Harrow

49. “Let this ignoble origin story stand as an invaluable lesson to you that a person’s beginnings do not often herald their endings.”

— Alix E. Harrow

50. “I was abruptly, entirely sick of it – of secrets and lies and almost-truths, things I half knew and half-suspected, patched-together stories that were never told in order from beginning to end. It seemed to be an unspoken agreement in the world that young girls without money or means were simply too insignificant to be told everything. Even my own father had waited until the very last moment to tell me his whole truth.”

— Alix E. Harrow