Top 250 Deborah Harkness Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In every ending there is a new beginning.”

— Deborah Harkness

Featured in: New Beginnings Quotes

2. “It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of witches.”

— Deborah Harkness

Featured in: Magic Quotes

3. “The devil is in the details.”

— Deborah Harkness

4. “Se Souvenir du passe, et qu’il ya un avenir: Remember the past, and that there is a future.”

— Deborah Harkness

5. “The king just sits there, moving one square at a time. The queen can move so freely. I suppose I’d rather lose the game than forfeit her freedom.”

— Deborah Harkness

6. “And I am here for only one reason: To make a difference.”

— Deborah Harkness

7. “Much of what qualified as magic was simply desire in action... Magic is desire made real.”

— Deborah Harkness

8. “It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.”

— Deborah Harkness

9. “His full name is Matthew Gabriel Philippe Bertrand Sebastien de Clermont. He was also a very good Sebastien, and a passable Gabriel. He hates Bertrand and will not answer to Philippe.”

— Deborah Harkness

10. “And happiness is always louder than sadness.”

— Deborah Harkness

11. “All that children need is love, a grown-up to take responsibility for them, and a soft place to land.”

— Deborah Harkness

12. “Yes, I see that you are behaving like a prince but that doesn’t mean you won’t behave like a devil at the first opportunity.”

— Deborah Harkness

13. “In every moment, for the rest of my life, I will be choosing you.”

— Deborah Harkness

14. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

— Deborah Harkness

15. “The scars don’t bother me. They are just signs that I’ve fought and survived.”

— Deborah Harkness

16. “With knot of one, the spell’s begun. With knot of two, the spell be true. With knot of three, the spell is free. With knot of four, the power is stored. With knot of five, the spell with thrive. With knot of six, this spell I fix.”

— Deborah Harkness

17. “They fear us because we are different. Fear breeds contempt, then hate. It is a familiar story.”

— Deborah Harkness

18. “To every question I have ever had, or ever will have, you are the answer.”

— Deborah Harkness

19. “Magic is desire made real.”

— Deborah Harkness

20. “That evening, rowing on the quiet river as sunset turned to dusk, I saw an occasional smoky smudge on the towpath, always slightly ahead of me, like a dark star guiding me home.”

— Deborah Harkness

21. “My ideas about vampires may by romantic, but your attitudes toward women need a major overhaul.”

— Deborah Harkness

Featured in: Romance Quotes

22. “We don’t lock up books in this house,” Philippe said, “only food, ale, and wine. Reading Herodotus or Aquinas seldom leads to bad behavior.”

— Deborah Harkness

23. “Remember the past – and await the future.”

— Deborah Harkness

24. “Turn to me with all your heart. Do not refuse me because I am dark and shadowed. The fire of the sun has altered me. The seas have encompassed me. The earth has been corruot d because of my work. Night fell over the earth when I sank into the miry deep, and my substance was hidden.”

— Deborah Harkness

25. “If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it’s only because it doesn’t know that the fire can consume it.”

— Deborah Harkness

26. “Every weaving is as unique as the weaver who makes it. The goddess does not want us to imitate some ideal of perfection, but to be our true selves.”

— Deborah Harkness

27. “Gallowglass returned to Sporrengasse with two vampires and a pretzel.”

— Deborah Harkness

28. “Thomas Paine had come to believe that religion was the worst form of tyranny because it pursued you through death and into eternity – something no king or despot had yet managed to do. At last, Marcus settled on repeating something Thomas himself had written. “ ‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

— Deborah Harkness

29. “He’s still a wanker,’ Gallowglass muttered.”

— Deborah Harkness

30. “Miracles should leave a mark, so that we can remember how precious they are.”

— Deborah Harkness

31. “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

— Deborah Harkness

32. “These days vampires gravitated toward particle accelerators, projects to decode the genome, and molecular biology. Once they had flocked to alchemy, anatomy, and electricity. If it went bang, involved blood, or promised to unlock the secrets of the universe, there was sure to be a vampire around.”

— Deborah Harkness

33. “You’re like a galaxy born from a dying star.”

— Deborah Harkness

34. “English vampires may not be as well behaved around witches as the American ones are.”

— Deborah Harkness

35. “I would rather have had this moment with you – just this one night – than centuries with someone else...”

— Deborah Harkness

36. “But it’s too soon for me to imagine losing you.”

— Deborah Harkness

37. “Do we understand each other?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’m so glad.’ Baldwin’s mouth lifted into a smile. ‘Answer your e-mail while you’re at it. I send you messages. You don’t answer. It’s aggravating.’ I nodded, afraid that if I opened my mouth, detailed instructions on just what he could do with his e-mail might pop out. Baldwin.”

— Deborah Harkness

38. “Don’t consider painful what’s good for you.”

— Deborah Harkness

39. “I see you, even when you hide from the rest of the world. I hear you, even when you’re silent.”

— Deborah Harkness

40. “My life now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everything before was preamble. Now I have you. One day you will be gone, and my life will be over.”

— Deborah Harkness

41. “I promise not to draw blood, if you promise not to weep.”

— Deborah Harkness

42. “Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century book collector and alchemist whose books and papers had come to the Bodleian from the Ashmolean Museum in the nineteenth century, along with the number 782.”

— Deborah Harkness

43. “Be yourself – Matthew Clairmont. Complete with your sharp vampire teeth and your scary mother, your test tubes full of blood and your DNA, your infuriating bossiness and your maddening sense of smell.”

— Deborah Harkness

44. “Matthew,’ I breathed, ‘I don’t think that’s bundling.”

— Deborah Harkness

45. “Change is the only reliable thing in the world.”

— Deborah Harkness

46. “If the thirsty stag runs to the brook, it’s only because he isn’t aware of the cruel bow... If the unicorn runs to its chaste nest, it’s only because he doesn’t see the noose prepared for him.”

— Deborah Harkness

47. “The devil is everywhere, sir. Those who believe otherwise fall prey to his wiles.”

— Deborah Harkness

48. “Do not fear me because I am dark and shadowed.”

— Deborah Harkness

49. “In November 2009 archivist Rima Jaen at the Goncalves archives in Seville, Spain, comes across Diana’s journal in a forgotten box in the archive attics.”

— Deborah Harkness

50. “You will not be alone either, Philippe de Clermont,” I whispered fiercely. “I’ll find a way to be with you in the darkness, I promise. And when you think the whole world has abandoned you, I’ll be there, holding your hand.” “How could it be otherwise,” Philippe said gently, “when you are in my heart?”

— Deborah Harkness