Top 140 Garth Nix Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It is taken care of. Nothing will not break into my Pit or the Far Reaches! I cannot speak for the other parts of the House, but we have Nothing well in hand here. I understand Nothing as no one else does! – Grim Tuesday.”

— Garth Nix

52. “Being published is not a necessary validation or a path everyone wants to take with their work. Writing – and finishing – a novel is a great thing in itself, whether or not the book is published, or becomes widely-read or not.”

— Garth Nix

53. “All this, combined with typical British reticence to discuss their relationship and its problems, led them to behave in such a repressed way to each other that everyone else around them knew immediately they were in love.”

— Garth Nix

54. “You may call me Mogget. As to what I am, I was once many things, but now I am only several.”

— Garth Nix

55. “I am a great believer that anything not expressly forbidden is explicitly allowed.”

— Garth Nix

56. “Who can I trust?” Arthur blurted out. “Those who wish you well,” said the Old One. “Not those who wish to use you well. Be a player, not a pawn.”

— Garth Nix

57. “I think having an open mind about these things is probably the most important thing, because even though I’ve never had an experience of the supernatural, something I couldn’t explain.”

— Garth Nix

58. “I love you,” he whispered. “I hope you don’t mind.”

— Garth Nix

59. “You are a fierce Librarian, aren’t you?”

— Garth Nix

60. “But the Dog was gone forever. Lirael.”

— Garth Nix

61. “I will not give up. It is the right thing to do, no matter the consequences.”

— Garth Nix

62. “Garth on naming characters “I spend lots of time on all the names in the books... Sabriel herself, I tried many different combinations of different words, trying to create a new name. In fact, her name comes from trying to combine the heraldic term for black which is Sable, because I wanted something that felt dark and mysterious, with the “iel” ending that you find in angels’ names.”

— Garth Nix

63. “She was no longer a shy Second Assistant Librarian. She was the Abhorsen-in-Waiting.”

— Garth Nix

64. “The most important questions – “What are you? Where did you come from?” – had a whole range of answers, starting with “I’m the Disreputable Dog” and “from elsewhere” and occasionally becoming as eloquent as “I’m your Dog” and “You tell me – it was your spell.”

— Garth Nix

65. “A passion thwarted will often go astray.”

— Garth Nix

66. “If she had been in a pointing competition, she would have lost points.”

— Garth Nix

67. “How come it’s all right for the bad guys to do whatever they want, and whenever I want to do something it’s ‘forget about it’?”

— Garth Nix

68. “Everyone and everything has a time to die.”

— Garth Nix

69. “Even now, she wished she could write a note, push it across the table, and go away to her room. But she was no longer a Second Assistant Librarian of the Great Library of the Clayr. Those days were gone, vanished with everything else that had defined her previous existence and identity.”

— Garth Nix

70. “It’s you I’m concerned about. You are letting your fear come between you and getting better.”

— Garth Nix

71. “Garth on where Sabriel came from “Sabriel grew very much out of the story... Sometimes people ask me, ‘Why did you write a strong young woman character?’ I just thought she was more interesting than if she was a young man.”

— Garth Nix

72. “It was like someone far away calling someone else’s name.”

— Garth Nix

73. “Devoid of life, it was also devoid of the Dead.”

— Garth Nix

74. “I hope you find some stories here that you will enjoy, or wonder about, or that linger uncomfortably in the mind when you wish they didn’t.”

— Garth Nix

75. “Bert and Dehlia had planted the seed of thought in her mind, and it was growing away busily putting out new shoots of thought, all of which were quite bothersome, because they were about things like responsibility and fairness, and thinking about others, and why being a princess perhaps should be about more than just having a nice library and three meals a day, particularly when other people didn’t have these things...”

— Garth Nix

76. “How come it’s all right for the bad guys to do whatever they want, and whenever I want to do something it’s ‘forget about it’? What’s the good of being the Rightful Heir anyway? All I get is trouble!”

— Garth Nix

77. “Please, Mogget,” whispered Lirael, too soft to be heard by anyone at all. But the white shape did hear. It stopped and turned inwards, to face Orannis, changing from a pillar of fire to a more human shape, but one with skin as bright as a burning star. “I am Yrael,” it said, casting a hand out to throw a line of silver fire into the breaking spell-ring, its voice crackling with force. “I also stand against you.”

— Garth Nix

78. “Just like the Perimeter! It never rains but it pours,” declared the Major.”

— Garth Nix

79. “Fantasy writers, they’re the bane of our existence!”

— Garth Nix

80. “Might have been and could have done, neither worth thinking on.”

— Garth Nix

81. “Every Clayr is given the gift to See some portent of her death, though not the death itself, for no human could bear that weight. Almost twenty years ago I Saw myself and your little dog, and in time I realized that this was the vision that foretold my final days.”

— Garth Nix

82. “Together, the bells and Dog sang a song that was more than sound and power. It was the song of the earth, the moon, the stars, the sea, and the sky, of Life and Death and all that was and would be. It was the song of the Charter, the song that had bound Orannis in the long ago, the song that sought to bind the Destroyer once again.”

— Garth Nix

83. “Madness is unfortunately not incompatible with government.”

— Garth Nix

84. “Oh, fierce librarians, then? Tell you to shush and that sort of thing?”

— Garth Nix

85. “Shakespeare knew too much.”

— Garth Nix

86. “What do you mean? I am Mogget, of course. The one and only Mogget. Though I have had other names.”

— Garth Nix

87. “What’s too late?” asked Mogget. “Hold.”

— Garth Nix

88. “Time plays tricks between here and home,” said Mogget sepulchrally, frightening the life out of the telephone operator.”

— Garth Nix

89. “Stop! By the Keys I hold, I order the Nothing to stop! House, you must hold against the Void!”

— Garth Nix

90. “It is always important to look beyond a pleasant visage.”

— Garth Nix

91. “Sometimes people ask me, ‘Why did you write a strong young woman character?’ I just thought she was more interesting than if she was a young man.”

— Garth Nix

92. “Be assured that any hurt to your spirit will pass in time. It is the nature of Death to take, but the nature of Life to give.”

— Garth Nix

93. “As it ‘appens, I am Arthur’s right-hand man,” said Suzy. “Or left-hand girl, I can’t remember where I stood last time. Anyhow, me and Arthur is like two fingers of a gauntlet. Or at least the thumb and the little finger. I mean, I’m his top General, and all. So if I say you’re in, you’re in.”

— Garth Nix

94. “One thing I did learn early on was not to put all my trust in magic. If it can be done without magic, it’s better done without magic.”

— Garth Nix

95. “Unhand my tail!” squealed the Will.”

— Garth Nix

96. “All of us recruits are equal in the eyes of the Army: low as you can go.”

— Garth Nix

97. “Some were Charter Mages, and there would not be time to argue rights and wrongs, so any aggressive magic he used would be countered or negated by these others, as was the nature of Charter Magic.”

— Garth Nix

98. “You’d better take over here as temporary Mistress, Joan,” he said to Professor Aiken.”

— Garth Nix

99. “There was John Masefield’s The Box of Delights; and the C. S. Lewis Narnia books; and Patricia Lynch’s The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey; The Winter of Enchantment by Victoria Walker; Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken; several of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels, including Susan’s favorite, The Silver Branch; Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones; The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner; Five Children and It by E. Nesbit; and many others.”

— Garth Nix

100. “Since being a prisoner was a definite improvement over being dead, which was what she thought was going to happen when the Loundergs had attacked, Suzy was quite cheerful.”

— Garth Nix