Top 140 Frances Hardinge Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Everybody betrayed her, so why expect otherwise? But it turned out that distrust could fool you and endanger you, just as trust could.”

— Frances Hardinge

102. “Silence itself could be used as deftly and cruelly as a kire.”

— Frances Hardinge

103. “She had big, vague eyes and a big, vague smile, and was always very busy in the way that a moth crashing about in a lampshade is busy.”

— Frances Hardinge

104. “There were creases at the corners of her mouth, the marks of too many words bitten back.”

— Frances Hardinge

105. “I died recently, and I am in no hurry to enjoy the experience again just yet.”

— Frances Hardinge

106. “They understood something together at that moment, Makepeace and Bear. Sometimes you had to be patient through pain, or people gave you more pain. Sometimes you had to weather everything and take your bruises. If you were lucky, and if everyone thought you were tamed and trained... there might come a time when you could strike.”

— Frances Hardinge

107. “One little superstition of mine I hope you will indulge. I never meet with perfect strangers in desolate bastle houses or alarmingly named alleyways at twilight. This trifling quirk I developed shortly after acquiring a large number of enemies.”

— Frances Hardinge

108. “Again Mosca felt she was up in the rafters, watching the mice. Little mouse, witless with fear. Running the wrong way. And here she was, just watching. Becoming a part of it by doing nothing.”

— Frances Hardinge

109. “They were preparing to become memories.”

— Frances Hardinge

110. “Bear, I need your eyes. I need your nose. I need your night-wits and forest-wisdom.”

— Frances Hardinge

111. “We are what we do, and what we allow to be done.”

— Frances Hardinge

112. “You must not love them,” said Quest gently. “It is easy to love power, because power tells you it is majesty and beauty and greatness. But the gods were monsters. Do not even love their memory.”

— Frances Hardinge

113. “She was not undamaged, however, and she knew it. No food or drink had passed her lips, but she had drunk deep of the Truth, and now it could not be flushed out of her system with bitter cordials, or washed from her skin, or picked out of her hair.”

— Frances Hardinge

114. “She had needed kindness before, and had received none. Now it was too late, and she did not know what to do with it.”

— Frances Hardinge

115. “I was always awake!” interrupted Faith. “I was always angry!”

— Frances Hardinge

116. “Maybe you couldn’t ever owe somebody your life, not really. You couldn’t let anyone else decide what you did with it. You had to live it yourself, as truly as you could.”

— Frances Hardinge

117. “It was not the first time Faith had been alone with the dead of course. She had watched five younger brothers wane, felt the trusting pressure of their small hands in hers. And later, each time, she had done her part in keeping watch over the body for the wake. There always needed to be somebody watching over the newly dead, just in case they turned out not to be dead after all. It was best to know these things before anyone was actually buried.”

— Frances Hardinge

118. “He could gaze upon a particular deep shade of green and pick out every nuance of the color. Zeluppian Fern Green, his mind would inform him. Gray, said his soul. Just a shade of gray with a greenish name. His well-trained tongue could pick out every flavor of a sweetmeat. Honey from bees fed only cowslip nectar, his mind would tell him, with cherries marinated for twenty-one years in peach-and-saffron brandy. Ash, said his soul. Ash and dust. Even.”

— Frances Hardinge

119. “Like medicine, truth could be used as a poison by someone cunning enough.”

— Frances Hardinge

120. “It is easy to love power, because power tells you it is majesty and beauty and greatness.”

— Frances Hardinge

121. “Clent, however, suppressed any sense of pity without the slightest difficulty. His brain was busy with the icy clockwork of calculation. If only this young woman’s fears were justified! Beamabeth Marlebourne would be unlikely to threaten anybody, locked away inside the Luck’s cell for the rest of her life. Such a fate had a tempting poetry to it too, given that she really was the Luck of Toll, and had been all her life.”

— Frances Hardinge

122. “In the interests of Truth, I would lie.”

— Frances Hardinge

123. “Even when she slept, her anxieties did not.”

— Frances Hardinge

124. “For a tiny instant Faith wondered whether it would benefit the doctor’s investigation if he experienced a cliff fall first-hand.”

— Frances Hardinge

125. “He was bellowing a great many words that were new to Mosca and sounded quite interesting. She memorized them for future use.”

— Frances Hardinge

126. “Why must we look inward, and only inward, as if the world ends where the sky begins?”

— Frances Hardinge

127. “The only sane option was to retreat back out into the corridor. Fortunately sanity had never really slowed Neverfell down.”

— Frances Hardinge

128. “I did not see your mother at the funeral,’ she said, following the thought. ‘She stopped coming to them after her own,’ Paul answered simply.”

— Frances Hardinge

129. “It is terribly bad form to admit to being terrified for one’s life, but nobody in their right mind would go to a Court banquet without making preparations. One must have the right costume, the right Faces, and at least eighty-two ways of avoiding assassination.”

— Frances Hardinge

130. “Stories were ruthless creatures and sometimes fattened themselves on bloody happenings.”

— Frances Hardinge

131. “What aspects of yourself would you fight to protect, as if you were fighting for your life?”

— Frances Hardinge

132. “Makepeace felt something in her chest wrench, and wondered if it was her heart breaking. She waited to see how that would feel. Perhaps hearts broke like eggs, and spilt, and stopped working. But all she felt was numb. ‘Perhaps my heart already broke and never grew back.”

— Frances Hardinge

133. “You couldn’t trust people. Dogs snarled before they bit you, but people often smiled.”

— Frances Hardinge

134. “You were a mistake, girl,′ she said simply, ’but a mistake honestly meant.”

— Frances Hardinge

135. “Besides, one cannot throw away everything that is touched by pain.”

— Frances Hardinge

136. “This made Faith feel as though she was wearing an old version of herself that was too small for her. It itched.”

— Frances Hardinge

137. “Worlds ended sometimes.”

— Frances Hardinge

138. “Twig-minx!” it screamed. “scrap-brat!”

— Frances Hardinge

139. “She imagined it, a great Bear lost in darkness, friendless and trapped as it had been for so long. It could not understand where it was, or why its body was so strange and weak. All it knew was that it was under attack, just as it had always been...”

— Frances Hardinge

140. “Mistress Gotely!” she shouted, her voice echoing blasphemously throughout the chapel. “Beth! Alys! Help me!” They would not come to her aid, she knew that. She was alone. But the other servants might hear her, and it would mean something to be remembered. She wanted them to know that she had not gone willingly or quietly. If they remembered that, she would still be something, if only a scar on their memories, a pang of guilt they tried to ignore.”

— Frances Hardinge

141. “It’s as if they’re wearing a lie, but it doesn’t fit them.’ Trista tried to straighten her thoughts. ‘They haven’t buttoned it the right way, so it’s baggy in some places and coming away in others.”

— Frances Hardinge

142. “The Bible says we should know a tree by the fruit it bears,” Makepeace replied, a little sharply. “If you burn my hand off, what should I think of you?”

— Frances Hardinge

143. “Makepeace did not know who the ‘others’ might be, but others were always a threat.”

— Frances Hardinge

144. “No, not like me. He’s no better than the other Fellmottes. Another rich man bent on what he thinks the world owes him, and willing to pay any price, as long as it’s in the blood of others.”

— Frances Hardinge

145. “And the bones fell to the ground, and other bones fell on top of them, and yet more bones, until there were whole hills and cliffs made of them. Death upon death upon death upon death. And two-legged animals dug up old bones and wondered at them. And then they died as well and lay there, like a rat in the sawdust, waiting to become old bones.”

— Frances Hardinge

146. “Sleep swallowed her like a pond gulping a pebble.”

— Frances Hardinge

147. “But then again, the dead are often easier to praise than the living.”

— Frances Hardinge