Top 350 Alix E. Harrow Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.”

— Alix E. Harrow

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

155. “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

156. “She didn’t think throwing down the tyranny of man would take so many meetings, but apparently it does.”

— Alix E. Harrow

157. “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

158. “I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.”

— Alix E. Harrow

159. “He loves pieces of her – the thunder-blue of her eyes, the full moon-glow of her breasts in the dark – but he never even met most of her. If he peeled back her pretty skin he’d find nothing soft or sweet at all, just busted glass and ashes and the desperate, animal will to stay alive.”

— Alix E. Harrow

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “He looks like a boy who wanted to grow flowers but was handed a sword instead. He looks like a man who gave up on hope a long time ago, but who keeps fighting anyway, on and on.”

— Alix E. Harrow

164. “You grew strong over those years, and fast, until your body was no longer something you wore but something you wielded, and Lord, what a weapon it became.”

— Alix E. Harrow

165. “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

166. “I should have spent more time thinking about your life than worrying about your death.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

168. “Because it’s easy to ignore a woman. But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

171. “Voting doesn’t seem like a waste of time to me.” She’s still fooling with her egg yolk, swirling it into gummy circles. Agnes’s stomach heaves. “Look, all that ‘votes for women’ stuff sounds real noble and all, but they don’t mean women like you and me. They mean nice uptown ladies with big hats and too much time on their hands.”

— Alix E. Harrow

172. “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

173. “I stumbled over something grand and wild, something that rips a hole in the shape of the world. I wrote something and it was true.”

— Alix E. Harrow

174. “If we were to draw her childhood wanderings on a map, represent her discoveries and destinations in topographic form and trace her winding way through them, we would see her as a girl solving a maze from the center outward, a Minotaur working her way free.”

— Alix E. Harrow

175. “They lived happily ever after, until they didn’t, because nothing does.”

— Alix E. Harrow

176. “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

177. “I liked what you said about e-equality.” The word feels silly in her mouth, four syllables of make-believe and rainbows.”

— Alix E. Harrow

178. “Did women actually faint, I wondered, or was that an invention of bad Victorian novels and Friday night picture shows? Or perhaps women simply contrived to collapse at convenient moments to delay the burden of hearing and seeing and feeling, just for a little while. I sympathized.”

— Alix E. Harrow

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

183. “Juniper keeps a little flame flickering in her chest, a bitter, hungry thing just waiting for something to burn.”

— Alix E. Harrow

184. “The newest one was a German immigrant named Miss Wilda, who wore heavy black woolen gowns and an expression that said she hadn’t seen much of the twentieth century yet but heartily disapproved of it thus far.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

188. “Ouroboran self-destruction.”

— Alix E. Harrow

189. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

191. “You have to make the best of whatever story you were born into, and if your story happens to suck ass, well, maybe you can do some good before you go.”

— Alix E. Harrow

192. “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

193. “The Constitution? What, exactly, do you think the Constitution is? A magic spell? A dragon, perhaps, that will swoop down to defend you in your most desperate hour?” Cleo straightens in her seat. Juniper doesn’t think she’s ever seen a face so full of scorn. “I assure you it has only ever been a piece of paper, and it has only ever applied to a very few persons.”

— Alix E. Harrow

194. “Fate is a story people tell themselves so they can believe everything happens for a reason, that the whole awful world is fitted together like some perfect machine, with blood for oil and bones for brass. That every child locked in her cellar or girl chained to her loom is in her right and proper place.”

— Alix E. Harrow

195. “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

196. “Bella resettles her spectacles. “But the spell to call back the Lost Way of Avalon. It required a maiden, a mother, and a crone, did it not?” The Crone shrugs. “Every woman is usually at least one of those. Sometimes all three and a few others besides.”

— Alix E. Harrow

197. “Morning! I brought you something.” I open my coat and the hellcat explodes out of it like one of those aliens that pops out of people’s chests.”

— Alix E. Harrow

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow