Top 140 Frances Hardinge Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Well, you will have to do. If you had died along with your mother, I would have taught the cat to read.”

— Frances Hardinge

52. “Her self-respect had suffered a head-on collision with love, a clash that generally only ends one way. Love does not fight fair. In that moment her pride, the gut knowledge that she was right, even her sense of who she was, meant nothing, faced as she was with the prospect of being unloved.”

— Frances Hardinge

53. “You will find out who you are when your choices test you. In the end, we are what we do and what we allow to be done.”

— Frances Hardinge

54. “So this was a nest of radicals. She thought a hotbed of sedition would involve more gunpowder and secret handshakes, and less shuffling of feet and passing the sugar.”

— Frances Hardinge

55. “My mother is not evil, Faith reminded herself. She is just a perfectly sensible snake, protecting her eggs and making her way in the world as best she can.”

— Frances Hardinge

56. “We thought ourselves kings of the ages. Now we find that all our civilisation has been nothing but a brief, brightly lit nursery, where we have played with paper crowns and wooden sceptres.”

— Frances Hardinge

57. “People were animals, and animals were nothing but teeth. You bit first, and you bit often. That was the only way to survive.”

— Frances Hardinge

58. “Perhaps illnesses could be left behind, just like small, badly concealed china corpses.”

— Frances Hardinge

59. “Still water wasn’t cruel and wasn’t kind. It didn’t care whether you swam or drowned.”

— Frances Hardinge

60. “I am not good. Something in Faith’s head broke free, beating black wings into the sky. Nobody good could feel what I feel. I am wicked and deceitful and full of rage. I cannot be saved. She did not feel hot or helpless any more. She felt the way snakes looked when they moved.”

— Frances Hardinge

61. “I want to be a bad example,’ she said. ‘I see.’ Myrtle stirred herself, ready to walk to the prow. ‘Well, my dear, I think you have made an excellent start.”

— Frances Hardinge

62. “It would probably be better to have a ruler who didn’t sell people or bend his own laws. For the moment, however, this man was perhaps just the best of the wrong answers available.”

— Frances Hardinge

63. “Mother was like this sometimes. Conversations became riddles with traps in them, and your answers had consequences.”

— Frances Hardinge

64. “No, nobody would ever call Neverfell ‘my lady’. She was still a ‘miss’ all the way – misunderstanding, making mistakes, getting into misadventures.”

— Frances Hardinge

65. “If someone throws aside their pride and begs with all their heart, and if they do so in vain, then they are never quite the same person afterwards. Something in them dies, and something else comes to life.”

— Frances Hardinge

66. “If someone throws aside their pride and begs with all their heart, and if they do so in vain, then they are never quite the same person afterwards. Something in them dies, and something else comes to life. Afterwards, it was as if some understanding of the world had sunk into Makepeace’s soul like winter dew. She knew that she would never feel safe or loved as she had before. And she knew that she would never, ever beg that way again.”

— Frances Hardinge

67. “I don’t quite have a plan, but I think now I sort of have a plan for how to make a plan for coming up with a plan. And I can’t think about it too hard right now or it won’t work.”

— Frances Hardinge

68. “What made a girl a damsel in distress? Were they not allowed claws? Mosca had a hunch that if all damsels had claws, they would spend a lot less time in distress.”

— Frances Hardinge

69. “He had been enjoying his explanation, and now she had spoiled things by knowing too much.”

— Frances Hardinge

70. “We thought ourselves kings of the ages. Now we find that our civilization has been nothing but a brief, brightly lit nursery, where we have played with paper crowns and wooden scepters. Beyond the door are the dark wastes where Leviathans wrestled for millennia. We are a blink of an eye, a joke amidst a tragedy.”

— Frances Hardinge

71. “He felt like a chess-master who, two moves from achieving checkmate, suddenly sees a live kitten dropped on to the middle of the board, scattering pieces.”

— Frances Hardinge

72. “A rain shower was rehearsing. A few experimental droplets filled the silence.”

— Frances Hardinge

73. “It was a joke, but centuries of distrust and fear lay behind it. Soon somebody would say something that was sharper and harder, but it would still be a joke. And then there would be a remark like a punch in the gut, but made as a joke. And then they would detain her if she tried to leave, and nobody would stop them because it was all only a joke...”

— Frances Hardinge

74. “You could keep people alive forever through stories.”

— Frances Hardinge

75. “Before her escort could react, she sprinted out from their little pool of lantern-light into the darkness, her feet pounding the soft, treacherous clods of the field. The guards called after her for a while, but did not pursue, In a lost city, how could they chase down every lost soul who became a little more lost?”

— Frances Hardinge

76. “Making a wish is like saying, ‘I can’t deal with anything, I give up, somebody bigger come along and solve it all instead.”

— Frances Hardinge

77. “Habits, places and faces grew into you over time, like tree roots burrowing into stone work.”

— Frances Hardinge

78. “The Devil has no better friend than an empty belly.”

— Frances Hardinge

79. “The past was all around her. She could smell it. It did not feel dead. It felt alive, and as curious about her as she was about it.”

— Frances Hardinge

80. “She wanted there to be more blood and screeching. She wanted each death to detonate before her like a little black firework. She wanted it to matter. There was bellowing all around her, but the killing itself was soft and quiet and matter of fact. Life to death, life to death, with no more drama than turning over a counterpane.”

— Frances Hardinge

81. “Despair was a numbing poison. The moment you decided the worst was inevitable, it was.”

— Frances Hardinge

82. “I’m glad we’re free, even if we do stupid things with the freedom sometimes. Maybe sometimes there isn’t a right thing to do. Maybe there’s just lots of wrong answers, and you have to pick one you can bear – something that doesn’t break who you are.”

— Frances Hardinge

83. “She knew that if you wanted somebody to believe something, there was no point forcing it down their throat. Far better to give them a hint, a glimpse, a taste, then snatch it away from them. The faster you ran, the more they would give chase, and the more likely to believe the hard-won information when they caught it.”

— Frances Hardinge

84. “She is the key to this mystery, a key that I will turn, by hook or by crook.”

— Frances Hardinge

85. “Her moment came. Nobody was looking. She sidled quickly across the deck and lost herself among the crates that clustered at the base of the boat’s shuddering, discoloured funnel. The air tasted of salt and guilt, and she felt alive.”

— Frances Hardinge

86. “She could feel her mind pulling loose like knitting, the neat stitches of her artificial days unravelling to become one mangled thread.”

— Frances Hardinge

87. “There was a reek in her nose, a slick dark green smell of water that was old enough to be clever and dangerous.”

— Frances Hardinge

88. “The ladies’ fans opened with cracks like pistol shots, and were held up to block the stranger from view.”

— Frances Hardinge

89. “My dear fellow,” he continued more soberly, “If you have managed to complicate things by forming a sentimental attachment in less than a week, then I doubt there is anything I can do for you. You, sir, are a romantic, and I suspect your condition is incurable.”

— Frances Hardinge

90. “I do not know,” said Dr Quick, “It is a blow to my vanity to consider the possibility that I am nothing but a bundle of thoughts, feelings and memories, given life by somebody else’s mind. But then again, so is a book.”

— Frances Hardinge

91. “Human fear has a terrible power. It changes everything, distorts everything, maddens everything. Fear is the dark womb where monsters are born and thrive.”

— Frances Hardinge

92. “There was another kind of beauty, however, and everyone on the Myriad knew it. A twisted beauty that turned your stomach even while it turned your head. Frecht was the old word, a harsh word ragged with superstitious awe. It was an ugliness and otherness that could only be holy, a breach of the rules that echoed those that no rules coul bind.”

— Frances Hardinge

93. “His gaze made her feel like a mouse in owl-country.”

— Frances Hardinge

94. “She dreamed of a world where books did not rot or give way to green blot, where words and ideas were not things you were despised for treasuring.”

— Frances Hardinge

95. “The world was turning cartwheels, Makepeace realized, and nobody was sure which was was up any more. Rules were breaking, but nobody was certain which ones. If you had enough confidence, you could walk in and at as if you knew what the new rules were, and other people would believe you.”

— Frances Hardinge

96. “Perhaps the world has always been like this, Mosca thought as she pushed her way through the crowd. Like a broken honeypot that looks whole, but just holds together because the shards are resting in place and are glued together with honey. You just need to prod it a bit, and it all starts oozing apart.”

— Frances Hardinge

97. “Somehow, without noticing, Mosca had become old enough to hear about such things.”

— Frances Hardinge

98. “It did seem hard to be doing something heroic while everyone was too busy to notice.”

— Frances Hardinge

99. “Trust was like mould. It accumulated over time in unattended places... Over the years, Makepeace had become encrusted with other people’s inattentive trust.”

— Frances Hardinge

100. “Her past was getting away from her.”

— Frances Hardinge