Top 250 Deborah Harkness Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I have come to serve you with a warning, Diana Bishop. Relationships between witches and vampires are forbidden. You must leave this house and no longer associate with Matthew de Clermont or any of his family. If you don’t, the Congregation will take whatever steps are necessary to preserve the covenant.”

— Deborah Harkness

102. “Everyone who has ever been in pain knows that morphine and magic are the same.”

— Deborah Harkness

103. “Hearts cannot be broken, Diana. And only love makes us truly immortal.”

— Deborah Harkness

104. “Neither his family nor his next taste of blood mattered as much as knowing that she was safe and within arm’s reach. If that was what it meant to be bewitched, he was a lost man.”

— Deborah Harkness

105. “For storms will rage and oceans roar When Gabriel stands on sea and shore. And as he blows his wondrous horn, Old worlds die, and new be born.”

— Deborah Harkness

106. “You have found a woman who is worthy of you, with courage and hope to spare, Matthaios.’ ‘I know,’ Matthew said, taking my hand. ‘Know this, too: you are equally worthy of her. Stop regretting your life. Start living it.”

— Deborah Harkness

107. “Too soon? There is no such thing,” Ysabeau said. “We are, all of us, asked to grow up too quickly. It is the way the gods remind us that life, no matter how long, is still but a breath.”

— Deborah Harkness

108. “The daemon glanced at his watch. The day was young, but he already knew why his friend was in Scotland. Matthew Clairmont was falling in love.”

— Deborah Harkness

109. “Alchemy is the story of creation, told chemically. Creatures are chemistry, mapped onto biology.”

— Deborah Harkness

110. “The strongest distinguishing characteristic of humans is their power of denial.”

— Deborah Harkness

111. “You’re impossible. Stop worrying about what other women do. Be your own extraordinary self.”

— Deborah Harkness

112. “I am capable of opening my own door,” I said, getting out of the car. “Why do today’s women think it’s important to open a door themselves?” he said sharply.”

— Deborah Harkness

113. “The house was winning, thanks to its chief weapon: Fleetwood Mac. Sarah had bashed Mom’s old radio to bits two days after we found it during a never-ending concert of “The Chain.” The house retaliated by removing all the toilet-paper rolls from the bathroom cabinets and replacing them with a variety of electronic gadgets capable of playing music. It made for a rousing morning.”

— Deborah Harkness

114. “It’s doubtful we’re the first creatures to love those we should not, and we surely won’t be the last.”

— Deborah Harkness

115. “For your wedding gift, I wish I had a spell that could make you see yourself as others do.’ ‘Based.”

— Deborah Harkness

116. “It took me eighteen hours to bring that boy into the world, and no time at all for some idiot with a gun to steal him away.” Mistress Bishop pulled a small bottle out of her pocket. “War is such a waste of women’s time.”

— Deborah Harkness

117. “My experiences thus far had me planning to throttle the first Tudor historian I met upon my return for gross dereliction of duty.”

— Deborah Harkness

118. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. – THOMAS PAINE.”

— Deborah Harkness

119. “We kissed each other, long and deep, while my legs opened like the covers of a book.”

— Deborah Harkness

120. “Be careful, daughter... You are a creature of the crossroads, neither here nor there. ‘Tis a dangerous place to be.”

— Deborah Harkness

121. “Because you will love him as you love no one else, I tied your magic to your feelings for him. Even so, only you will have the ability to draw it into the open.”

— Deborah Harkness

122. “I watched in silence as the parts of Matthew I knew and loved – the poet and the scientist, the warrior and the spy, the Renaissance prince and the father – fell away until only the darkest, most forbidding part of him remained. He was only the assassin now. But he was still the man I loved.”

— Deborah Harkness

123. “War is such a waste of women’s time.”

— Deborah Harkness

124. “I want what I shouldn’t want, and I crave someone I can never have.”

— Deborah Harkness

125. “I keep telling you we have no reason to rush. Modern creatures are always in such a hurry,” Matthew murmured, drawing the fallen sheet down to my waist. “Call me old-fashioned if you’d like, but I want to enjoy every moment of our courtship.”

— Deborah Harkness

126. “She’s taken over one of the castle’s towers and painted the walls with images of the philosopher’s stone. It’s like working inside a Ripley scroll! I’ve.”

— Deborah Harkness

127. “He was so worthy of being loved; I didn’t want him to be alone. Something in my expression must have revealed what was on my mind. “No pity, Auntie. The winds do not always blow as the ship desires,” he murmured, tucking me into my chair. “The winds do what I tell them to do.” “And I plot my own course.”

— Deborah Harkness

128. “Do you wonder what it would be like for me to taste you?”

— Deborah Harkness

129. “Rebecca asked me what made the most lasting impression on children. I told her it was the stories their parents read to them at night, and all the messages about hope and strength and love that were embedded in them.”

— Deborah Harkness

130. “You do angry. I just saw it. And you left at least one hole in my carpet to prove it.”

— Deborah Harkness

131. “The goddess does not want us to imitate some ideal of perfection, but to be our true selves.”

— Deborah Harkness

132. “Something had just happened. Something magical.”

— Deborah Harkness

133. “Everytime I pick up a book or a document from the past, I’m in a battle with people who lived hundreds of years ago. They have their secrets and obsessions – all the things they won’t or can’t reveal.”

— Deborah Harkness

134. “Scholars do one of two things when they discover information that doesn’t fit what they already know. Either they sweep it aside so it doesn’t bring their cherished theories into question or they focus on it with laserlike intensity and try to get to the bottom of the mystery.”

— Deborah Harkness

135. “Normal’ is a bedtime story-a fable-that humans tell themselves to feel better when faced with overwhelming evidence that most of what’s happening around them is not ‘normal’ at all.”

— Deborah Harkness

136. “Ysabeau wanted me to know she approved of you. Like the gold from which it is made, you are steadfast. You hide many secrets within you, just as the bands of the ring hide the poesies from view. But it is the stone that best captures who you are: bright on the surface, fiery within, and impossible to break.”

— Deborah Harkness

137. “Even so I gasped in surprise when our two bodies became one – warm and cold, light and dark, female and male, witch and vampire, a conjunction of opposites.”

— Deborah Harkness

138. “Scientist. Vampire. Warrior. Spy. The bells paused before the final knell. Prince. I wondered what more our journey would reveal about this complex man I had married.”

— Deborah Harkness

139. “Survival and sexuality were linked in ways I’d never appreciated until now.”

— Deborah Harkness

140. “Mark me well, Diana: Lives will be lost because of your love for my son... What does it matter who deals the deathblow? If you do not do it, then Matthew will.”

— Deborah Harkness

141. “I’d studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.”

— Deborah Harkness

142. “Fear had also choked out any desire to work magic. It had been my crutch and my cloak, keeping me from exercising my power. Fear had sheltered me from the curiosity of others and provided an oubliette where I could forget who I really was: a witch. I’d.”

— Deborah Harkness

143. “Philippe was right. There were times when Matthew behaved like an idiot – or the most arrogant man alive.”

— Deborah Harkness

144. “Mommy’s got a firecracker inside her,” was the way my father explained it with his wide indulgent grin, but firecrackers, I learned, were not simply bright and lively, they were unpredictable and they could startle and frighten you too.”

— Deborah Harkness

145. “Stop trying to be perfect. Try being real for a change.”

— Deborah Harkness

146. “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.”

— Deborah Harkness

147. “I trust my wife’s judgement... That’s what Philippe says about Granny, just before all hell breaks loose.”

— Deborah Harkness

148. “Our arrival there and not at a busier, more crowded airport on the other side of town was yet another example of the magical efficiency and convenience of vampire travel.”

— Deborah Harkness

149. “Giving a woman your whole life is meaningless without giving her your whole heart as well.”

— Deborah Harkness

150. “She could not imagine why these companies all chose shades of blue for their logos. Blue had always struck her as such a serene, soothing color, yet all social media offered was endless agitation and posturing. It was worse than the court of Versailles. Come.”

— Deborah Harkness