Top 280 Alix E. Harrow Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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. They preened and cooed like doves around him, signing their names to his proposal with many extra flourishes.”

— Alix E. Harrow

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “Unless there are words and ways waiting among the children’s verses; power passes in secret from mother to daughter, like swords disguised as sewing needles.”

— Alix E. Harrow

157. “I’m at least three-fourths straight, but her lashes are very long, and very golden, and I’m not made of stone.”

— Alix E. Harrow

158. “They had unearthed the rough shape of the love between them and were content to let the rest of it proceed more sedately, unfurling like an endless sea before their prow.”

— Alix E. Harrow

159. “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

160. “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

161. “Winter crept over Nin stealthily, like a great white cat made of chill mists and sharp-edged winds.”

— Alix E. Harrow

162. “Because it’s easy to ignore a woman.” Juniper’s lips twist in a feral smile. “But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

164. “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

165. “True witching, old and dark and wild as midnight.”

— Alix E. Harrow

166. “I wonder what the songs will say about the Devil now that she is covered in the blood of her own God.”

— Alix E. Harrow

167. “Such a small, brave act of kindness, repaid with suffering. I’d thought only sins were punished.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

169. “Because the place you are born isn’t necessarily the place you belong. I was born into a world that abandoned me, stole from me, rejected me; is it so surprising I found a better one?”

— Alix E. Harrow

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

173. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

175. “I have no home, no porch light. But I have what I need, and it’s enough, It’s just that sometimes, God help me, I want more.”

— Alix E. Harrow

176. “You people are always trying to invent reasons for things. Monsters only come for bad children, for loose women, for impious men. The truth is that the powerful come for the weak, whenever and wherever they like. Always have, always will.”

— Alix E. Harrow

177. “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

178. “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

179. “That temper will get you burnt at the damn stake, Mama Mags used to tell her. A wise woman keeps her burning on the inside.”

— Alix E. Harrow

180. “I wanted to believe him, but I’d met enough empty promises in my life to know one when I heard it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

181. “I shouldn’t be proud, because I did not raise you – but I am.”

— Alix E. Harrow

182. “We may be either beloved or burned, but never trusted with any degree of power.”

— Alix E. Harrow

183. “Every thinking woman has once wanted what she shouldn’t, what she can’t have.”

— Alix E. Harrow

184. “Their teachers were desperate need and decades of rage; the hoarded words of their mothers and grandmothers; one another.”

— Alix E. Harrow

185. “Perhaps young girls are like camels, and there are only so many straws they can carry before they break.”

— Alix E. Harrow

186. “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. Acts of word-magic leave their workers ill and drained, and the more ambitious the working – the more it defies the warp and weft of the world as it is – the higher the toll.”

— Alix E. Harrow

187. “I wonder if the feeling will fade. If the memory of a single season will be buried beneath the weight of ordinary years, until it is just a story, just another little lie. If I will learn to be content with enough, and forget that I was ever foolish enough to want more.”

— Alix E. Harrow

188. “I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared.”

— Alix E. Harrow

189. “Perhaps one cannot walk through a door and back out again without changing the world.”

— Alix E. Harrow

190. “Is this a fire-starting spell?” “It seems so, yes.” “Can I try it?” “Can you start a magical fire in a tower full of paper and leather?” Juniper considers. “What if it were a very small fire?”

— Alix E. Harrow

191. “You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways.”

— Alix E. Harrow

192. “Juniper never thought much about her sisters’ lives after they left Crow County – they’d just walked off the edge of the page and vanished, a pair of unfinished sentences – but she thought a lot about what she’d say if she ever saw them again.”

— Alix E. Harrow

193. “It felt like donning a suit of armor or sprouting wings, extending past the boundaries of myself; it felt an awful lot like love.”

— Alix E. Harrow

194. “Surviving is often a matter of knowing when you’re beat.”

— Alix E. Harrow

195. “I think they stole the words and ways from us, and left us nothing but our wills.”

— Alix E. Harrow

196. “She wonders if he hears the shake in her voice, and whether he mistakes it for fear.”

— Alix E. Harrow

197. “But all the caring was beaten and burned out of her, and now she’s just hate with a heartbeat.”

— Alix E. Harrow

198. “I’m sure you may bring whatever you please, Mr. Lee, so long as you bring magic also.”

— Alix E. Harrow

199. “I say “amateur” only because it was fashionable for wealthy men to refer to their passions in this dismissive way, with a little flick of their fingers, as if admitting to a profession other than moneymaking might sully their reputations.”

— Alix E. Harrow

200. “Yet he’s still scared. What is he afraid of?” “Same thing every powerful man is afraid of.” The Crone shrugs. “The day the truth comes out.” “The day he gets what’s coming,” says the Maiden. The Mother meets Agnes’s eyes and Juniper sees something pass between them, the gleam of a tossed blade. “Us.”

— Alix E. Harrow