Top 280 Alix E. Harrow Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Perhaps one cannot walk through a door and back out again without changing the world.”

— Alix E. Harrow

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

263. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

267. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

270. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

272. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

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

— Alix E. Harrow

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Alix E. Harrow

281. “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

282. “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