Top 280 Alix E. Harrow Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 6

201. “It is never advisable to make decisions before dawn or without consulting one’s spouse, and he had done both.”

— Alix E. Harrow

202. “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

203. “The trick to being nothing is to want nothing.”

— Alix E. Harrow

204. “The wind rises. It rushes through the square, midnight-cool and mischievous, fluttering the pages of Miss Cady Stone’s notes. It smells wild and sweet, half-familiar, like Mama Mags’s house on the solstice. Like earth and char and old magic. Like the small, feral roses that bloomed in the deep woods.”

— Alix E. Harrow

205. “She was young and graceful and had the sort of face that launches ships and eats hearts.”

— Alix E. Harrow

206. “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

207. “But I remind you that he was merely a man. Whereas we” – she looks over her spectacles at Agnes and gives her a very small smile – “are witches.”

— Alix E. Harrow

208. “Being a perfectly unique specimen is lonely, as it turns out.”

— Alix E. Harrow

209. “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

210. “Even my own writings – so damnably powerless – may have just enough power to reach the right person and to tell the right truth, and change the nature of things.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

212. “A witch is just a woman who wants too much.”

— Alix E. Harrow

213. “She accumulated the dust of other worlds on her skin like ten thousand perfumes, and left constellations of wistful men and impossible tales in her wake.”

— Alix E. Harrow

214. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

216. “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

217. “It’s stupid to think things like that. It just gives you this hollow, achy feeling between your ribs, like you’re homesick even though you’re already home, and you can’t read your magazine anymore because the words are all warped and watery-looking.”

— Alix E. Harrow

218. “I could describe the way the smells of brine and sun have permeated every stone of every street, or the way the tide callers stand at their watchtowers and cry out the hour for their Cities. I could tell you of the many-shaped ships that crisscross the seas with careful writing stitched on their sails praying for good fortune and fair winds. I could tell you of the squid-ink tattoos that adorn the hands of every husband and wife, and of the lesser word-workers who prick words into flesh.”

— Alix E. Harrow

219. “But even if I could tame my own impulses and write something scholarly, I fear it would not matter, because who would take seriously my claims without solid proof? Proof that I cannot provide, because it disappears almost as soon as I discover it.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

221. “Wickedness was like beauty: in the eye of the beholder.”

— Alix E. Harrow

222. “Agnes presses her lips to her daughter’s fiery hair and feels her life cleaving, splitting cleanly into two pieces: the time before, and the time after.”

— Alix E. Harrow

223. “Mags said magic invited a certain amount of mess. That’s why the honeysuckle grew three times as large around her house, and birds nested in her eaves nomatter the season.”

— Alix E. Harrow

224. “Chosen? If you three were chosen, it was by circumstance. By your own need. That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”

— Alix E. Harrow

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

229. “He blinked with the stunned expression of a man who knew the word no existed but had never actually met it in the flesh.”

— Alix E. Harrow

230. “What is magic anyway? If not a way when there is none.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

233. “Juniper could have told her more: how she dug and filled the hole herself to save the cost of a gravedigger and how dirt rang hollow on the coffin lid; how every shovelful took some of herself along with it, until she was nothing but bones and hate.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

235. “No scholar, no matter how clever or meticulous, can map smoke and myth onto the page.”

— Alix E. Harrow

236. “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

237. “I may not be a witch, Miss Eastwood, but I’m quite the tolerable librarian” -Mr. Blackwell.”

— Alix E. Harrow

238. “It occurred to me that dogs are probably never lost in the in-between, because they always know precisely where they are going.”

— Alix E. Harrow

239. “The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but the important ones rarely are.”

— Alix E. Harrow

240. “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

241. “Doors introduce change. And from change come all things: revolution, resistance, empowerment, upheaval, invention, collapse, reformation – all the most vital components of human history, in short.”

— Alix E. Harrow

242. “Beauty is a kind of vital, ferocious burning at a soul’s center that ignites everything it touches.”

— Alix E. Harrow

243. “Perhaps I cannot believe words are entirely powerless, even here.”

— Alix E. Harrow

244. “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

245. “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

246. “They tell us a hundred different stories, which are all the same story: We love you, and have always loved you.”

— Alix E. Harrow

247. “It’s one of those respectable, pocketless affairs that obliges ladies to carry stupid little handbags, so Juniper can’t take so much as a melted candle-stub or a single snake tooth with her. 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 damn much.”

— Alix E. Harrow

248. “Of course this is the choice. It’s always this choice in the end – sacrifice someone else, trade one heart for another, buy your survival at the price of someone else’s. Save yourself but leave your sister behind.”

— Alix E. Harrow

249. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow