Top 160 Margaret Rogerson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “They looked like a pair of cupids who had decided they liked shooting people with real arrows better. They were horrible. I loved them so much.”

— Margaret Rogerson

102. “Are all librarians like you, or is it only the feral ones who have been raised by booklice?”

— Margaret Rogerson

103. “You’re a proper monster Silas. I’m glad of it.”

— Margaret Rogerson

104. “She wasn’t a wielder of chains; she was a breaker of them.”

— Margaret Rogerson

105. “He was astonishingly vain even by fair folk standards, which was like saying a pond is unusually wet, or a bear surprisingly hairy.”

— Margaret Rogerson

106. “But that was the problem with the old me, I was coming to realize. She’d accepted that behaving correctly meant not being happy, because that was the way the world worked. She hadn’t asked enough – of life, or of herself.”

— Margaret Rogerson

107. “What must it be like? To meet someone, to forge a connection, all in the span of one golden afternoon – only to find out that for her, each passing minute was a year. Each second, an hour. She would be dead before the sun rose the next day. A keen, quiet pain twisted my heart.”

— Margaret Rogerson

108. “I wondered if my head and heart would ever reconcile, or whether I’d just cursed myself to relive this moment for the rest of my years, half assured I’d made the only choice available to me, half always whispering if only, the whole of me filled with bitter regret.”

— Margaret Rogerson

109. “I think – I think I was a bit dead already, before you came along.”

— Margaret Rogerson

110. “Now she felt as though she were a ghost haunting her own body, gazing at her life through a dirty glass.”

— Margaret Rogerson

111. “She then sat down opposite the steward’s desk and answered a number of job-related questions, such as how quickly she could run, and whether she strongly valued keeping all ten of her fingers. The steward seemed impressed that she found all of his questions perfectly reasonable. Most people, he explained, walked straight out the door. “But this is a library,” she replied in surprise. “What do they expect – that the books won’t try to bite off their fingers?”

— Margaret Rogerson

112. “I enlisted Rook’s help in wedging myself up into the corner of the settee, because I wasn’t sure I could sit upright on my own, and determinedly pretended I didn’t have a bright red face and a snotty nose.”

— Margaret Rogerson

113. “I stood gaping at Gadfly until a puzzled smile crossed his lips and he extended his pale hand in my direction, perhaps trying to determine whether I’d died standing up, not an unreasonable concern, as to him humans no doubt seemed to expire at the slightest provocation.”

— Margaret Rogerson

114. “Very few things escape my attention in the springlands – even the plucking of a flower.” I looked at the cowslip guiltily.”

— Margaret Rogerson

115. “Not every story has a happy ending,” she offered. “But most do, if you’re brave enough to keep reading to the end.”

— Margaret Rogerson

116. “The sooner we get started, the faster I can get back to tormenting widows and scandalizing the elderly with my nefarious black arts.”

— Margaret Rogerson

117. “I’m already with you, and it suits me perfectly well,” she said. “You’re enough for me the way you are, Nathaniel Thorn. I want nothing more.”

— Margaret Rogerson

118. “Wardens both protected grimoires from the world and protected the world from them.”

— Margaret Rogerson

119. “Never forget that knowledge is your greatest weapon.”

— Margaret Rogerson

120. “Me, the goat, the revenant, we weren’t very different from each other in the end. Perhaps deep down inside everyone was a just a scared animal afraid of getting hurt, and that explained every confusing and mean and terrible thing we did.”

— Margaret Rogerson

121. “This was a look that would make time stop, if it could. Soft and sharp at once, an aching tenderness edged with sorrow, naked proof of a heart already broken. Here I stood in a dragonfly dress, holding his arm, and he knew our time was almost over.”

— Margaret Rogerson

122. “Hello, you menace.”

— Margaret Rogerson

123. “I have found the scrying mirror, Miss Scrivener.” His tone was mild. “In the future, I advise against using the laundry chute to dispose of magical artifacts.”

— Margaret Rogerson

124. “His eyes narrowed. “So you do know your thaumaturgical theory.” Elisabeth decided not to tell him that she simply read a lot of novels.”

— Margaret Rogerson

125. “I’m not decent,” she explained, hugging her arms to her chest. “That’s all right,” he replied. “I hardly ever am, myself.”

— Margaret Rogerson

126. “Something drew tight inside of her, like a violin string awaiting the touch of a bow. Looking down at him, her heart ached with a song that did not have words or notes or form, but strained nonetheless to be given voice- a sensation that was not unlike suffering, for it seemed too great for her body to contain.”

— Margaret Rogerson

127. “There’s no need to thank me, Scrivener,” Nathaniel said from the floor. He was still peering into cracks in the baseboard, creeping along on his hands and knees. “I’ll get down on all fours for you whenever you like.”

— Margaret Rogerson

128. “We need to talk about what you said last night.” “I hate it when people tell me that,” he replied. “It’s never good.”

— Margaret Rogerson

129. “Amusement glittered in his eyes. “I was warned I’d see some strange things in the countryside,” he said, “but I admit, I didn’t expect to find a feral librarian roaming the stacks.”

— Margaret Rogerson

130. “I’ll have you know that I’m very good-looking by undead standards.”

— Margaret Rogerson

131. “But this is a library,” she replied in surprise. “What do they expect – that the books won’t try to bite off their fingers?”

— Margaret Rogerson

132. “They watched without speaking as it ascended to burn itself to ashes – a gruesome, tortured, deadly thing, monstrous but not beyond love, capable in the end of this final act of redemption.”

— Margaret Rogerson

133. “You see, here is the Lady’s grace. It has been here all along. She has shown me Her grace in a drink of water when I was thirsty and bread when I was hungry and a bed when I was tired, not through miracles, but through the kindness of those who stood to gain nothing from helping me. It is through the hands of strangers that She has carried out Her will.”

— Margaret Rogerson

134. “If you don’t believe in anything,” he said over his shoulder, “then you have a great deal less to lose.”

— Margaret Rogerson

135. “Perhaps I hadn’t realized the worst part after all. Back when I’d made the offer, I hadn’t known the revenant would talk so much.”

— Margaret Rogerson

136. “The revenant had devoured the populations of entire cities; it was also the entity who ordered me to eat my pottage.”

— Margaret Rogerson

137. “I understood now, away from my convent for the first time since I had arrived there, that the longing I had felt that day and many days since was homesickness. Homesickness for a place I had never been, for answers to questions I carried in my heart but for which I had no words. I hadn’t recognized it then, because I hadn’t understood what it felt like to have a home.”

— Margaret Rogerson

138. “A dangerous way of thinking. But libraries are dangerous places. There is no getting around it.”

— Margaret Rogerson

139. “I don’t want a suitor,” she replied, emotion coursing through her. “I just want you, Nathaniel, not life-endangering acts of heroism, or – or priceless treasures, or even starlight in a jar. I haven’t changed my mind. I still love you. I think it’s possible I might love you even more than I did three months ago.”

— Margaret Rogerson

140. “As he helped her prepare, the sky darkened beyond the cracked-open window. The distant urban melody of wheels rattling over cobblestone, urchins hawking the evening paper, and church bells sonorously pealing the hour mingled with the muted conversations of guests passing in the hall outside.”

— Margaret Rogerson

141. “I felt as though I needed to prove it still existed as around me a dozen voices shouted my name, desperate to own pieces of me, uncaring of the truth: even if they butchered me like an animal, there wouldn’t be enough blood in my body to anoint their holy arrows. They would martyr me themselves to satisfy their hunger for a saint.”

— Margaret Rogerson

142. “It may be cruel, but it is also fair.”

— Margaret Rogerson

143. “Books, too, had hearts, though they were not the same as people’s, and a book’s heart could be broken: she had seen it happen before.”

— Margaret Rogerson

144. “I wished I were better at speaking. All those thoughts were in my head, but I didn’t know how to get them out.”

— Margaret Rogerson

145. “The revenant noticed me sizing up an escape route. “You had better not, nun. Ideally the priest won’t be looking for you at all, but he certainly won’t be looking for a version of you that’s voluntarily socializing with a group of humans. Also, I want to try a pastry.” I felt obscurely betrayed.”

— Margaret Rogerson

146. “I was no longer certain that what I’d felt for Rook back in the parlor truly had been love. It had felt like it at the time. I’d never experienced anything like it before. But I’d hardly known him, even though in my feverish infatuation I’d felt as though we’d been confiding in each other for years. Could you really love someone that way, when all they were to you was a pleasant illusion?”

— Margaret Rogerson

147. “Perhaps deep down inside everyone was just a scared animal afraid of getting hurt, and that explained every confusing and mean and terrible thing we did.”

— Margaret Rogerson

148. “To think that the world could fall to ruin due to the decisions of a single small-minded man in charge – that that was all it took to doom everyone –.”

— Margaret Rogerson

149. “She liked nothing better than being surrounded by books.”

— Margaret Rogerson

150. “But he didn’t pretend to be anything other than a monster. In that way, he was more honorable than most of the people she had met since leaving Summershall.”

— Margaret Rogerson