Top 140 Frances Hardinge Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The world is like a broken wrist that healed the wrong way, and will never be the same again.”

— Frances Hardinge

2. “True stories seldom have endings. I don’t want a happy ending, I want more story.”

— Frances Hardinge

3. “Tea is the magic key to the vault where my brain is kept.”

— Frances Hardinge

4. “Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies.”

— Frances Hardinge

5. “I want my chirfugging goose back!”

— Frances Hardinge

6. “Nobody’s mind ever remains a blank page, however carefully they are locked away from the world.”

— Frances Hardinge

7. “Brand a man as a thief and no one will ever hire him for honest labor – he will be a hardened robber within weeks. The brand does not reveal a person’s nature, it shapes it.”

— Frances Hardinge

8. “There is always hope. There are always chances.”

— Frances Hardinge

9. “My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic.”

— Frances Hardinge

10. “Over this year, familiarity had done its usual work, picking off the gilded paint one scratch at a time.”

— Frances Hardinge

11. “If wits were pins, the man would be a veritable hedgehog.”

— Frances Hardinge

12. “Revenge is a dish best served unexpectedly and from a distance – like a thrown trifle.”

— Frances Hardinge

13. “Sometimes fear made you angry. Perhaps after years anger cooled, like a sword taken from a forge. Perhaps in the end you were left with something very cold and very sharp.”

— Frances Hardinge

14. “Oh, painted smirk of a hopeless dawn, the girl is still wearing her breeches...”

— Frances Hardinge

15. “It has made me what I am. When every door is closed, one learns to climb through windows. Human nature, I suppose.”

— Frances Hardinge

16. “Words were dangerous when loosed. They were more powerful than cannon and more unpredictable than storms. They could turn men’s heads inside out and warp their destinies. They could pick up kingdoms and shake them until they rattled.”

— Frances Hardinge

17. “There was an invisible necklace of nows, stretching out in front of her along the crazy, twisting road, each bead a golden second.”

— Frances Hardinge

18. “This was thieves’ cant. Mosca was a lover of words, and she had a sneaking liking for the grimy panache of cant, and those who wore it like a ragged red cloak.”

— Frances Hardinge

19. “There was a hunger in her, and girls were not supposed to be hungry. They were supposed to nibble sparingly when at table, and their minds were supposed to be satisfied with a slim diet too.”

— Frances Hardinge

20. “Would you have her birched in the public square? Baited by dogs perhaps? Madam, we have destroyed her good name, and she will find the world a much colder and darker place as a result. Even now her father is probably changing her name to Buzzletrice.”

— Frances Hardinge

21. “Ordinary life did not stop just because kings rose and fell, Mosca realized. People adapted. If the world turned upside down, everyone ran and hid in their houses, but a very short while later, if all seemed quiet, they came out again and started selling each other potatoes.”

— Frances Hardinge

22. “Quiet people often have a weather sense that loud people lack. They feel the wind-changes of conversations, and shiver in the chill of unspoken resentments.”

— Frances Hardinge

23. “There was a hunger in her, and girls were not supposed to be hungry. They were supposed to nibble sparingly when at table, and their minds were supposed to be satisfied with a slim diet too. A few stale lessons from tired governesses, dull walks, unthinking pastimes. But it was not enough. All knowledge – any knowledge – called to Faith, and there was a delicious, poisonous pleasure in stealing it unseen.”

— Frances Hardinge

24. “I don’t want a happy ending, I want more story.”

— Frances Hardinge

25. “You couldn’t plan a picnic without strangling yourself with the cloth.”

— Frances Hardinge

26. “Children are little priests of their parents, watching their every gesture and expression for signs of their divine will.”

— Frances Hardinge

27. “It was all very well being told that she could do nothing to make things better. Neverfell did not have the kind of mind that could take that quietly. She did not have the kind of mind that could be quiet at all.”

— Frances Hardinge

28. “Everybody knew that books were dangerous. Read the wrong book, it was said, and the words crawled around your brain on black legs and drove you mad, wicked mad.”

— Frances Hardinge

29. “This is a battlefield, Faith! Women find themselves on battlefields, just as men do. We are given no weapons, and cannot be seen to fight. But fight we must, or perish.”

— Frances Hardinge

30. “Push something in someone’s face, and they will shove it away reflexively. Threaten to snatch it away from them, and sometimes they become convinced that it is what they want.”

— Frances Hardinge

31. “You, sir, are a romantic, and I’m afraid the condition is incurable. -Eponymous Clent.”

— Frances Hardinge

32. “It was hopeless. She was flawless. She was a sunbeam. Mosca gave up and got on with hating her.”

— Frances Hardinge

33. “I can’t think straight. But why am I trying to do that anyway? Everybody else thinks straight. That’s why nobody expects me to think zigzag-hop.”

— Frances Hardinge

34. “But I’m afraid to sleep!” whispered Trista. “What if I fall to pieces before I wake up? What if tomorrow morning I’m just a pile of leaves and sticks tucked under a blanket? What if this is the last time I’ve got left, and I waste it all being asleep, then wake up dead?”

— Frances Hardinge

35. “Lies like knives, lies like poultices. The tiger’s stripe, the fawn’s dusky dapple. And everywhere, everywhere, the lie that people told themselves. Dreams like cut flowers, with no nourishing root. Will-o’-the-wisp lights to make them feel less alone in the dark. Hollow resolutions and empty excuses.”

— Frances Hardinge

36. “It is dangerous to lock oneself away and lose track of what is happening outside.”

— Frances Hardinge

37. “But scissors are really intended for one job alone – snipping things in two. Dividing by force. Everything on one side or the other, and nothing in between.”

— Frances Hardinge

38. “Choose a lie that others wish to believe” was written beneath it. “They will cling to it, even if it is proven false before their face. If anyone tries to show them the Truth, they will turn on them and fight them tooth and nail.” And.”

— Frances Hardinge

39. “We always find it difficult to forgive our heroes for being human.”

— Frances Hardinge

40. “Magic” was not an answer; it was an excuse to avoid looking for one.”

— Frances Hardinge

41. “C’era una vera e propria fame in lei, e alle ragazze non si cnfaceva essere fameliche. Le ragazze dovevano sbocconcellare con parsimonia a tavola. e le loro menti dovevano accontentarsi di una dieta morigerata. Ma tutto questo a lei non bastava. Tutta la conoscenza – ogni genere di conoscenza – attirava Faith, e c’era un piacere delizioso, pernicioso, nel carpirla senza essere scoperta.”

— Frances Hardinge

42. “Large people tend to have large heads. Men are no cleverer than we are, Miss Sunderly. Just taller.”

— Frances Hardinge

43. “It is a very terrible thing to be far smaller than one’s rage.”

— Frances Hardinge

44. “In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell.”

— Frances Hardinge

45. “I am anything I wish to be. The world cannot choose for me. No, it is for me to choose what the world shall be.”

— Frances Hardinge

46. “What’s a little maiming and treachery between friends?”

— Frances Hardinge

47. “She had always known that she was rated less than Howard, the treasured son. Now, however, she knew that she was ranked somewhere below “miscellaneous cuttings.”

— Frances Hardinge

48. “Lord Fellmotte was not a man. He was an ancient committee. A parliament of deathly rooks in a dying tree.”

— Frances Hardinge

49. “This was the hardest part. It was easier to be the witch, the harpy. Being human was dangerous.”

— Frances Hardinge

50. “Just between you and me,’ Mosca whispered, ‘radicalism is all about walkin’ on the grass.”

— Frances Hardinge