Top 150 Amal El-Mohtar Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “She has observed, with pleasure, the very fine china of which the establishment boasts: Meissen’s Ming Dragon, sinuous as arteries, persimmon bright against gilt-edged bone white. She looks forward to her own pot, anticipates the dark, smoky, malty path her chosen tea will pick between the notes of candied rose, delicate bergamot, champagne and muscat and violet.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

102. “Killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. Having killed never does.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

103. “I would have fought you forever. I would have wrestled you through time. I would have turned you, and been turned. I would do anything. I have done so much, and would have done as much again, and more. And yet here I am, a fool, writing you one last time, and here you are, a fool, reading me. We’re one, at least, in folly.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

104. “Ask the pilgrims how the labyrinth came to be, and they offer answers varied as their sins.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

105. “It’s not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It’s that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it’s as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood. Not that it didn’t before–Garden loves music with a depth impossible to sound–but now its song’s for me alone.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

106. “Your fellows have their intrigues and their passions, and now and again a clever play, but there’s none so intricate, so careful, so assured. You’ve whetted me like a stone.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

107. “I am not skilled in taking up correspondence. But I have scanned enough books, and indexed enough examples, to essay the form.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

108. “To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

109. “Violet flowers choke the dead guns. If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses’ mouths would grow berries.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

110. “You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

111. “London Next – the same day, month, year, but one strand over – is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy – this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

112. “She seeds the Strand 9 Amazon Basin with defanged versions of European superbugs ten centuries before first contact, and when conquistadors arrive, they face locals by the millions, strong, thriving communities that won’t perish by mere contact with the world across the waves.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

113. “I dream of you. I keep more of you inside my mind, my physical, personal, squishy mind, than I keep of any other world or time.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

114. “Have you ever watched this kind of sunset? The colours don’t blend: the redder the sky the bluer the water, as we tilt away from the sun.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

115. “Red screams at the sky. She calls Beings in which she does not believe to account. She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

116. “But why? Red has done what she came to do, she thinks. But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

117. “That’s all I want now. A small place, a dog, green grass. To touch your hand. To run my fingers through your hair.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

118. “Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

119. “She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

120. “You asked me to tell truths. I have. What do I want? Understanding. Exchange. Victory. A game – hiding and discovery. You’re a swift opponent, Blue. You play long odds. You run the table. If we’re to be at war, we might as well entertain one another.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

121. “You ask if I’ve been lonely. I hardly know how to answer. I have observed friendship as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate endeavour, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

122. “I love you, Blue. Have I always? Haven’t I? When did it happen? Or has it always happened? Like your victory, love spreads back through time. It claims our earliest association, our battles and losses. Assassinations become assignation.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

123. “You’ve always been the hunger at the heart of me, Red–my teeth, my claws, my poisoned apple. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I made you and you made me.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

124. “All good stories travel from the outside in.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

125. “Shadows and sure things are more their style.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

126. “She’s kept her gloves clean, for the most part, but now she stains them red as a name.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

127. “Owls are fascinating creatures, but it’s harder than I’d thought to convince them to take food. Maybe this one didn’t trust me.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

128. “I knew you once. I thought I did, and thought I knew myself as well. My little body, tiny wings, though small, still yet my very own. But I cannot see, cannot be sure, if in this fragile frame of mine, if in this dust, I have the strength to come to know you twice.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

129. “Poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

130. “The future harvests us.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

131. “When I was a girl, I loved reading. An archaic pastime, I know; the index and download are faster, more efficient, offering superior retention and acquisition of knowledge.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

132. “Fortunately, geniuses understand that young men are often fools.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

133. “If Blue were any less professional, she might have looked stunned. She might have chewed her lip. She might have walled up the inside of herself into a tomb and drowned it in a bog and set the bog on fire in her panic of what and when and how long.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

134. “She kills again and again, frequently, but not always, to save.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

135. “The season turns. You will be free–from your recovery and from your task. I’ll be sent, no doubt, to undo the damage you’ve caused. And we’ll run again, the two of us, upthread and down, firefighter and fire starter, two predators only sated by each other’s words.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

136. “I feel- to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

137. “Because it is the end, she cannot resist the urge to make this deadly thing beautiful.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

138. “That’s us, always: the volcano and the wave.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

139. “Red wrote too much too fast. Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt. But butterfly wings break when touched. Red knows her own weaknesses as well as anyone. She presses too hard, breaks what she would embrace, tears what she would touch to her teeth.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

140. “All the stars are eyes here, always seeking.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

141. “All this running and murder merely passes time.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

142. “We’re one, at least, in folly.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

143. “You have me watching birds, and though I don’t know their names like you know them, I have seen small bright singers puff before they trill. That’s how I feel. I sing myself out to you, and my talons clutch the branch, and I am wrung out until your next letter gives me breath, fills me to bursting.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

144. “Red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

145. “One person may wear different faces in different rooms. Minds swap bodies for sport.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

146. “The tears have anger in them at first, but anger burns out fast. Tears stay.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

147. “Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

148. “She has won, which is not an unfamiliar feeling. She is happy, which is.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

149. “Blue loves cities – their anonymity, their smells and sounds – but she loves forests, too, places other people call quiet that are anything but.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

150. “You must feel it – the difference? We’re on the brink of something.” “Brinks,” says Garden, with casual fondness, “are traditionally stepped back from.” “They are also fine places over which to tip one’s enemies,” says Blue. “Traditionally.”

— Amal El-Mohtar