Top 280 Alix E. Harrow Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Companions. See the curve of that C like a pair of outstretched arms? It implied the sort of friends who might slay dragons or go on hopeless quests or swear blood oaths at midnight.”

— Alix E. Harrow

52. “Word-magic comes at a cost, you see, as power always does. Words draw their vitality from their writers, and thus the strength of a word is limited by the strength of its human vessel.”

— Alix E. Harrow

53. “It turns out that once you begin, habit and memory keep your body moving in the right directions, like a wound-up clock ticking dutifully through the seconds.”

— Alix E. Harrow

54. “Hearts aren’t chessboards, and they don’t play by the rules.”

— Alix E. Harrow

55. “I felt like a woman reading a mystery novel with every fourth line missing. There’s really only one thing a person can do when they’re hip-deep in a mystery novel: keep reading.”

— Alix E. Harrow

56. “Books are Doors and I wanted out.”

— Alix E. Harrow

57. “If you are wondering why other worlds seem so brimful of magic compared to your own dreary Earth, consider how magical this world seems from another perspective. To a world of sea people, your ability to breathe air is stunning; to a world of spear throwers, your machines are demons harnessed to work tirelessly in your service; to a world of glaciers and clouds, summer itself is a miracle.”

— Alix E. Harrow

58. “Time, sitting on your breastbone like a black-scaled dragon, minutes clicking like claws across the floor, hours gliding past on sulfurous wings.”

— Alix E. Harrow

59. “Cats, I have found, seem to exist in more or less the same form in every world; it is my belief that they have been slipping in and out of doors for several thousand years. Anyone familiar with house cats will know this is a particular hobby of theirs.”

— Alix E. Harrow

60. “She’s the siren and the selkie. The virgin and the Valkyrie. Artemis and Athena.”

— Alix E. Harrow

61. “Let this ignoble origin story stand as an invaluable lesson to you that a person’s beginnings do not often herald their endings, for Adelaide Lee did not grow into another pale Larson woman. 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

62. “Sometimes pain is too unavoidable, too necessary to feel.”

— Alix E. Harrow

63. “Samuel Zappia was my only nonfictional friend.”

— Alix E. Harrow

64. “My father – who is a true scholar and not just a young lady with an ink pen and a series of things she has to say – puts it much better: “If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”

— Alix E. Harrow

65. “But he’d seen me and he’d wanted me, and he’d been raised to think wanting something was the same as deserving it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

66. “Despair, once established, can be quite difficult to uproot.”

— Alix E. Harrow

67. “Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

68. “That I have lived and killed and lived again in the name of a man who does not deserve it because I wanted so badly to be beloved. But only one person in all my lives has ever loved me, and he does not wear a crown.”

— Alix E. Harrow

69. “People were always guessing like that, categorizing me as one thing or another, but Mr. Locke assured me they were all equally incorrect. “A perfectly unique specimen,” he called me.”

— Alix E. Harrow

70. “Worlds were never meant to be prisons, locked and suffocating and safe. Worlds were supposed to be great rambling houses with all the windows thrown open and the wind and summer rain rushing through them, with magic passages in their closets and secret treasure chests in their attics.”

— Alix E. Harrow

71. “But when I saw that raggedy blue door standing so lonesome in the field, I wanted it to lead someplace else. Someplace other than Ninley, Kentucky, someplace new and unseen and so vast I would never come to the end of it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

72. “I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s.”

— Alix E. Harrow

73. “True scholarship needs neither an origin nor a destination, good master. To seek new knowledge is its own motivation.” This was precisely the sort of lofty non-answer that pleased scholars best.”

— Alix E. Harrow

74. “She taught us everything important comes in threes: little pigs, billy goats gruff, chances to guess unguessable names. Sisters.”

— Alix E. Harrow

75. “A girl is such an easy thing to break: weak and fragile, all alone, all yours. But they aren’t girls anymore, and they don’t belong to anyone. And they aren’t alone.”

— Alix E. Harrow

76. “I felt the lure of that offer like a hook behind my heart. To be not-alone, to be loved, to have that warm presence always at my shoulder...”

— Alix E. Harrow

77. “She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.”

— Alix E. Harrow

78. “She’d been so taken by him, so seduced by the admiration in his eyes. But she should have known no man ever loved a woman’s strength – they only love the place where it runs out. They love a strong will finally broken, a straight spine bent.”

— Alix E. Harrow

79. “She’s the little girl in the red cloak who doesn’t run from the wolf but walks arm in arm with him deeper into the woods.”

— Alix E. Harrow

80. “Mothers are supposed to be weak, weepy creatures, women who give birth to their children and drift peacefully into death, but the Mother is none of those things. She’s the brave one, the ruthless one, the witch who traded the birthing-chamber of the battlefield, the kitchen for the knife. Boadicea and heartless Hera, the mother who became a monster.”

— Alix E. Harrow

81. “All stories 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

82. “In my experience, the people you cared most about did not linger. They were always turning away, leaving you behind, never coming back.”

— Alix E. Harrow

83. “There are times when thank you is so inadequate, so dwarfed by the magnitude of the debt, that the words wilt in your throat.”

— Alix E. Harrow

84. “I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared. She meets Miss Araminta’s eyes, dark and knowing, sharp and soft, and thinks maybe every mother is both things at once.”

— Alix E. Harrow

85. “Behind every witch is a woman wronged.”

— Alix E. Harrow

86. “My grandfather built this house. He told me there would always be someone who needed to hide, and that there ought always be a Blackwell there to hide them.”

— Alix E. Harrow

87. “I remember her the way she used to be. I think she thought if she made herself small enough and quiet enough, she would be safe.” She was wrong.”

— Alix E. Harrow

88. “Agnes isn’t surprised, not really. She knows powerful men only keep their promises when they have to, and they never have to. But she’s surprised how angry it makes her.”

— Alix E. Harrow

89. “Something in her eyes made wise boatmen hesitate – something that spoke of abandon and fearlessness, a person dangerously unmoored from her own future.”

— Alix E. Harrow

90. “If you want to blame someone for a fire, look for the men holding matches.”

— Alix E. Harrow

91. “The Calamitous Coven.” “No.” “Eve’s Army.” “No! It ought to be about, I don’t know, sisterhood or union – ” “The Ladies Union of Giving the Bastards What’s Coming to Them.”

— Alix E. Harrow

92. “I lay in bed, feeling the champagne tide retreating and leaving me beached, like some unfortunate sea creature. In its absence the Thing – heavy, black, suffocating – returned, as if it had been waiting all evening for the two of us to be alone. It slid oil-slick over my skin, filled my nostrils, pooled at the back of my throat. It whispered in my ear, stories about loss and loneliness and little orphan girls.”

— Alix E. Harrow

93. “Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.”

— Alix E. Harrow

94. “There is no cross-examination, no defense. This is a witch-trial, after all, and witches have even fewer rights than women.”

— Alix E. Harrow

95. “The truth is: Adelaide was the most beautiful being I have seen in this world or any other, if we understand beauty to be a kind of vital, ferocious burning at a soul’s center that ignites everything it touches.”

— Alix E. Harrow

96. “And you found you did not mind being a devil, so long as you were his.”

— Alix E. Harrow

97. “It occurs to me that this lonely, beastly, bleeding boy is the only person who has ever fought for me, ever stood between me and the dark and told me to save myself.”

— Alix E. Harrow

98. “I would rather love a coward than mourn a legend.”

— Alix E. Harrow

99. “It occurs to me that I’ve been mourning two people all these years – the mother I had, and the mother I wish I had – and that neither of them was the one who kept a roof over my head.”

— Alix E. Harrow

100. “Most people can’t tell the difference between truth telling and madness.”

— Alix E. Harrow