Top 280 Alix E. Harrow Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Old women are supposed to be doting and addled, absent-minded grandmothers who spoil their sons and keep soup bubbling on the stove-top, but the Crone is none of those things. She’s the canny one, the knowing one, the too-wise witch who knows the words to every curse and the ingredients for every poison. She is Baba Yaga and Black Anna; she is the wicked fairy who hands out curses rather than christening-gifts.”

— Alix E. Harrow

103. “Agnes feels a heady heat through her, like summer wine. Men really ought to try offers of fealty rather than flowers.”

— Alix E. Harrow

104. “It’s an odd feeling, having one’s wildest suspicions proved true. It’s satisfying to find you aren’t insane, of course, but somewhat disheartening to realize you are indeed being hunted by a shadowy organization of apparently infinite reach.”

— Alix E. Harrow

105. “One witch you can laugh at. Three you can burn. But what do you do with a hundred?”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

107. “She’s surprised to feel a pang of pity for them: they thought they were in the kind of story where the wicked witches were caught and burned at the end, where all the little children were tucked safely into bed with the smell of smoke in their hair. It must be upsetting to discover themselves in the kind of story where the witches make friends with the flames instead, where they snap their chains and laugh up at the stars with sharp teeth.”

— Alix E. Harrow

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

114. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

116. “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

117. “I liked the stillness of the room, too, and the way the smell of him lingered in the air like dust motes: sea salt and spices and strange stars.”

— Alix E. Harrow

118. “I later learned that her people had no number higher than ten thousand, and claiming there were ten thousand of a thing meant there was no purpose in counting them because they were infinite.”

— Alix E. Harrow

119. “I see her choosing now whether to make her love into a cage or a key.”

— Alix E. Harrow

120. “Agnes learned young that you have a family right up until you don’t. You take care of people right up until you can’t, until you have to choose between staying and surviving.”

— Alix E. Harrow

121. “In the pain of my loss, I gave you the pain of absence.”

— Alix E. Harrow

122. “The boy returned at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning. It’s official library policy to report truants to the high school, because the school board felt we were becoming ‘a haven for unsupervised and illicit teenage activity.’ I happen to think that’s exactly what libraries should aspire to be, and suggested we get it engraved on a plaque for the front door.”

— Alix E. Harrow

123. “I riffle through my mental box of inspirational quotes and come up with a Dylan Thomas line that I actually know from Interstellar. “Do not go gentle into that good night, princess.”

— Alix E. Harrow

124. “Except I won’t le him, because I need him. And I might be a liar and a thief and a cheat, but I’ll walk barefoot through hell for what I need.”

— Alix E. Harrow

125. “History is a circle, and you people are always looking for the beginnings and endings of it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

126. “But Doors, like murder suspects in cheap mysteries, are often where you least expect them.”

— Alix E. Harrow

127. “But sometimes it feels like I’m pulling up the carpeting in an old house, and finding everything underneath has gone to rot.”

— Alix E. Harrow

128. “It’s a risk just to be a woman, in my experience. No matter how healthy or hardworking she is.”

— Alix E. Harrow

129. “She thinks of Jonah in the belly of the whale and the little red witch inside the wolf and wonders if either of them felt a little relieved to be eaten, to be taken away from the world and permitted to curl in the suffocating black, alone.”

— Alix E. Harrow

130. “Her eyes were wind-whipped and her smile at the night sky was sly, as if she and the stars were on familiar terms.”

— Alix E. Harrow

131. “Listen, not every story is made for telling. Sometimes just by telling a story you’re stealing it, stealing a little of the mystery away from it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

132. “Maybe magic is just the space between what you have and what you need.”

— Alix E. Harrow

133. “We disappeared into our separate worlds, together but apart, and it was so peaceful and right-feeling that I found myself pretending that it happened every morning.”

— Alix E. Harrow

134. “And if it hurts either way surely she should at least enjoy the sin for which she suffers.”

— Alix E. Harrow

135. “She should like a grief-struck madwoman, broken and hopeless, but instead she looks like an angel cast down from Heaven struggling back to her feet with blood on her teeth, ready to make war with God himself.”

— Alix E. Harrow

136. “I expected him to shout at me, perhaps even hoped he would. I wanted him to abandon this pretense of goodwill and good intentions, to cackle with glee. That was what villains were supposed to do; that was what gave the heroes permission to hate them.”

— Alix E. Harrow

137. “It isn’t pain or suffering that unmakes a person; it’s only time.”

— Alix E. Harrow

138. “Bella informs her that this is the precise reason why women’s dresses no longer have pockets, to show they bear no witch-ways or ill intentions, and Juniper responds that she has both, thank you very much.”

— Alix E. Harrow

139. “Power, my dear, has a language. It has a geography, a currency, and – I’m sorry – a color. This is not something you may take personally or object to; it is simply a fact of the world, and the sooner you accustom yourself to it, the better.”

— Alix E. Harrow

140. “She felt rubbed raw, as if the grasses in the field had been sharp-edged, cutting away at that childish part of her that believed in adventure and magic.”

— Alix E. Harrow

141. “Seems to me they’re the same thing, more of less. Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both... They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.” -Juniper.”

— Alix E. Harrow

142. “Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both... ” She gestures in midair again. “They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.”

— Alix E. Harrow

143. “I can’t remember if they did the “speak now or forever hold your peace” thing in Medieval times, or if it’s one of those Victorian inventions, like brides wearing white or homophobia.”

— Alix E. Harrow

144. “The silence that followed his departure was shy and slinking, as if it wanted to be awkward but didn’t quite dare beneath Miss Irimu’s steady eye.”

— Alix E. Harrow

145. “The backlash will come one day, the way it always does. I know the world won’t change easy.”

— Alix E. Harrow

146. “Like a girl with a lit match, finally shown something she can burn.”

— Alix E. Harrow

147. “She knows powerful men only keep their promises when they have to, and they never have to.”

— Alix E. Harrow

148. “Surely trust is never truly broken, but merely lost.” Beatrice’s lips twist. “And what is lost, that can’t be found?”

— Alix E. Harrow

149. “Ouroboran self-destruction.”

— Alix E. Harrow

150. “It was my own fault. My fault, for thinking I could just run away, gather my nerve and walk into the wide unknown like a hero beginning a quest, For thinking I could bend the rules, just a little, and and write myself into some better, grander story.”

— Alix E. Harrow