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

201. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

203. “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

204. “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

205. “Ouroboran self-destruction.”

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

221. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

230. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

234. “Sometimes I was so lonely I thought I might wither into ash and drift away on the next errant breeze.”

— Alix E. Harrow

235. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

241. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

244. “But photographs, like mirrors, are notorious liars.”

— Alix E. Harrow

245. “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

246. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

248. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

250. “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