Top 280 Alix E. Harrow Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

58. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

60. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

65. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

67. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

69. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

77. “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

78. “I wonder sometimes where the first witch came from. If perhaps Adam deserved Eve’s curse.” His smile twists. “If behind every witch is a woman wronged.”

— Alix E. Harrow

79. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “Doors, once closed, do not reopen.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “Except she’s not a baby anymore: her jaw is hard and square, her shoulders wide, her eyes blazing with a grown woman’s helping of hate.”

— Alix E. Harrow

90. “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

91. “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

92. “She is a silhouette on the windowsill, an apparition in the alley, a woman there and gone again. She is a pocket full of witch-ways and a voice whispering the right words to the right woman, the clack of a cane against cobbles.”

— Alix E. Harrow

93. “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

94. “It used to be witches were wild as crows and fearless as foxes, because magic blazed bright and the night was theirs. But then came the plague and the purges. The dragons were slain and the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses.”

— Alix E. Harrow

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

99. “She doesn’t know why she did it. Maybe she’s tired of knowing better, of minding her place.”

— Alix E. Harrow

100. “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