Top 120 Kelly Barnhill Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Failure was not an indication of perpetual failure – no! Instead, it was another step along the creative process: we make; we discard. By discarding, I could make again. I could do what I needed to do: write the next book. Write the right book.”

— Kelly Barnhill

52. “But then you were enmagicked. I didn’t mean to, darling; it was an accident, but it couldn’t be undone. And I loved you. I loved you so much. And that couldn’t be undone either.”

— Kelly Barnhill

53. “Excuse me,” Fyrian said. And he heaved himself over to a low shrub and vomited profusely. “Oh dear. I seem to have lit some things on fire.”

— Kelly Barnhill

54. “Flying on the backs of a flock of paper birds is less comfortable than you might imagine.”

— Kelly Barnhill

55. “Hope and light and motion, her soul whispered. Hope and formation and fusion, Hope and heat and accretion. The miracle of gravity. The miracle of transformation. Each precious thing is destroyed and each precious thing is saved. Hope, hope, hope.”

— Kelly Barnhill

56. “Anger is a funny thing. And it does funny things to us if we keep it inside. I encourage you to consider a question: Who benefits, my dear, when you forst yourself to not feel angry?” She tilted her head and looked at me so hard I thought she could see right into my bones. She raised her eyebrows. “Clearly not you.”

— Kelly Barnhill

57. “Anger is a funny thing. And it does funny things to us if we keep it inside. I encourage you to consider a question: Who benefits, my dear, when you force yourself not to feel angry?”

— Kelly Barnhill

58. “I was four years old when I first saw a dragon. I was four years old when I first learned to be silent about dragons. Perhaps this is how we learn silence – an absence of words, and absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be.”

— Kelly Barnhill

59. “Gratitude is a funny thing. It feels so similar to joy.”

— Kelly Barnhill

60. “Men, after all, delight in nothing so much as to recast themselves in the center of the story.”

— Kelly Barnhill

61. “Embarrassment, as it turns out, is more powerful than information. And shame is the enemy of truth.”

— Kelly Barnhill

62. “The world pressed on her strangely, like a coat that no longer fit.”

— Kelly Barnhill

63. “And now I realize, there is a freedom in forgetting. Or at least it is something that feels like freedom. There is a freedom in not asking questions. There is a freedom in being unburdened by unpleasant information.”

— Kelly Barnhill

64. “Even imperfect things can be precious, after all. The choice itself is precious. The smallness and the largeness of an individual life does not change the fundamental honor and value of every manifestation of our personhood.”

— Kelly Barnhill

65. “A good scientist must remain curious, open-minded, humble, and above all, obedient to the data, and to the facts.”

— Kelly Barnhill

66. “It is our enemies from whom we learn enmity, and it is our friends from whom we learn friendship. The question, then, is not ‘What shall we learn?’ The question is ‘What shall we choose to teach?”

— Kelly Barnhill

67. “This book is not based on Christine Blasey Ford or her testimony, but it would not have existed without that woman’s bravery, her calm adherence to the facts, and her willingness to relive one of the worst moments of her life to help America save itself from itself. Her actions didn’t work, but they still mattered. And maybe that’s enough, in our fervent hope that the next generation gets it right.”

— Kelly Barnhill

68. “The antidote to anger is tenderness, and the antidote to discord is reconciliation.”

— Kelly Barnhill

69. “The beautiful thing about science is that we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know. It requires an incredible amount of humility to be willing to be wrong nearly all the time. But we have to be willing to be wrong, and proven wrong, in order to increase knowledge overall. It is a thankless, and essential, job. Thank goodness.”

— Kelly Barnhill

70. “The sky was so blue it broke my heart and the world smelled of something beginning.”

— Kelly Barnhill

71. “The downtrodden becomes the bearer of a heavenly, righteous flame. It burns me, even now. I find myself unbound by earth, unbound by man, unbound by wifely duty and womanly pain.”

— Kelly Barnhill

72. “Just go mad. Madness and magic are linked, after all.”

— Kelly Barnhill

73. “There is no room for sorrow in a heart full of fire.”

— Kelly Barnhill

74. “Sometimes, she said the knots were magic. Sometimes, she said they were math. More often, though, she said that both were true, the way a particle can be both matter and light and no one knows why.”

— Kelly Barnhill

75. “Life is long, after all. And over time, the paths we take tend to intertwine and overlap.”

— Kelly Barnhill

76. “She insisted that they focus their energies on raising a little girl who was, by nature, a tangle of mischief and motion and curiosity.”

— Kelly Barnhill

77. “People are awfully good at forgetting unpleasant things.”

— Kelly Barnhill

78. “Sometimes, I feel that we are all tricked by love, and its rigid requirement of pain. We find the love of our lives and cleave to our beloved when we are still quite young and do not yet understand that we must, by our nature, die someday. In any successful marriage, one partner must face the reality of being very old, and very alone. What is grief, but love that’s lost its object?”

— Kelly Barnhill

79. “The words that she whispered became the words that I whispered. I wore them uncomfortably, like a dress that fits in theory but still feels off. Does memory decay? Does it shrivel and dry up and collapse? Is it a cricket in the pocket of the goddess, alive only through the force of misplaced love? If I held on to my mother’s memory, did that mean that she was still with me?”

— Kelly Barnhill

80. “My love is boundless. My heart is infinite. And my joy expands and expands. You’ll see.”

— Kelly Barnhill

81. “There is nothing lewd about biology, research, or basic facts, gentlemen, and you make yourselves fools when you try to classify the quest for understanding as obscene. The only thing more patently obscene than ignorance is willful ignorance. Arrest yourselves.”

— Kelly Barnhill

82. “Some things are hard to talk about, and then the world clams up and pretends like it was nothing. Or they act like it never happened in the first place. But maybe that’s a mistake. Just because people won’t talk about something, it doesn’t mean that it’s any less true or important.”

— Kelly Barnhill

83. “She tilts her head. Her black eye is a pool of ink. It is a bottomless pit. It is a collapsed star, all density and hunger and relentless gravity, pulling everything it can into its center- to be unraveled, unmade, undone, and unrecognizable. How can anyone survive that kind of love?”

— Kelly Barnhill

84. “No one know exactly what happened that night in 1952 – other than that twenty-five different people rang the operator, asking to make a collect call, only to be told, “A girl can only take so much after all.” And then the line went dead.”

— Kelly Barnhill

85. “Her actions didn’t work, but they still mattered. And maybe that’s enough, in our fervent hope that the next generation gets it right.”

— Kelly Barnhill

86. “And maybe this is the same with all of us – our best selves and our worst selves and our myriad iterations of mediocre selves are all extant simultaneously within a soul containing multitudes.”

— Kelly Barnhill

87. “We were each assigned a boy to work for. He would be our assigned friend. I can’t even remember which boy I was assigned. All I know is that I did a wretched job on purpose.”

— Kelly Barnhill

88. “The Tower is meant to be a center for learning, not a tool of tyranny. Today the doors are opening.” “Even to the library?” Wyn said hopefully. “Especially the library. Knowledge is powerful, but it is a terrible power when it is hoarded and hidden. Today, knowledge is for everyone.”

— Kelly Barnhill

89. “Public good means that the public is good.”

— Kelly Barnhill

90. “I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past.”

— Kelly Barnhill

91. “I began to make plans for what my future might be – what once felt like a mad dash to the end of a cliff now felt like an interesting path in a beautiful wood that may or may not lead to the top of a mountain. And yes, the chances of my arrival at that destination were uncertain, but oh! What a mountain! And oh! What a view! And what a pleasure it was to keep moving forward.”

— Kelly Barnhill

92. “I knew in the deepest place in my heart that my mother would not – and could not – understand.”

— Kelly Barnhill

93. “There were a lot of falsehoods in this world, and it seemed a large percentage of them were posted in hallways, and announced ont he school’s PA system.”

— Kelly Barnhill

94. “Instead, they drew dragons. Big dragons, tiny dragons. Dragons destroying skyscrapers and dragons swimming with whales and dragons dancing on the head of a pin and dragons skidding down one arm of the Milky Way. Dragons in school desks. Dragons in cars. Dragons doing dishes. Dragons downing missiles. Dragons laying waste to armies or governments or home economics classrooms. There were no words. No explanations. No statements of intent. Just dragons.”

— Kelly Barnhill

95. “Was I the immovable object, or was I the unstoppable force? Perhaps I was both. Perhaps this is what we learn from our mothers.”

— Kelly Barnhill

96. “Love made him giddy. Love made him brave. Love made foggy questions clearer.”

— Kelly Barnhill

97. “And it felt good to be uncontained, the way a bird must feel when it realizes that the thing constraining it was nothing more than an eggshell – delicate and fragile, and just waiting to be cracked open.”

— Kelly Barnhill

98. “Some people are gifted not only in seeing the best in people, but in convincing those people to see the best in themselves.”

— Kelly Barnhill

99. “It’s not a matter of letting anything stand. It’s a matter of accepting that the world isn’t the same as you thought it was before.”

— Kelly Barnhill

100. “But I am a scientist, sirs, and my allegiance is not to this body, nor even to myself, but only to the truth. Who benefits when knowledge is buried? Who gains when science succumbs to political expediency?”

— Kelly Barnhill