Top 40 Marie Brennan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Our wisdom grows not by staking out claims and defending them against all comers, but by sharing information freely, so that we may work together for the betterment of all.”

— Marie Brennan

2. “One benefit of being an old woman now, and moreover one who has been called a “national treasure,” is that there are very few who can tell me what I may and may not write.”

— Marie Brennan

3. “The dragon within my heart stirred, shifting her wings, as if remembering they could be used to fly.”

— Marie Brennan

4. “There is very little pleasure in being snubbed over a task for which one is well qualified. There is, however, quite a bit of pleasure in watching the ones who did the snubbing later eat their own words.”

— Marie Brennan

5. “Would that I were a man,’” I said, quoting Sarpalyce’s legend. “Except that I do not wish I were a man. I only wish that being a woman did not limit me so.”

— Marie Brennan

6. “Entomologists trap insects in their killing jars and then pin their corpses to cards, and no one utters a single squeak of protest. For that matter, let a gentleman hunt a tiger for its skin, and everyone applauds his courage. But to shoot a dragon for science? That, for some reason, is cruel.”

— Marie Brennan

7. “Sheep eat the grass, wolves eat the deer, and dragons eat everything that doesn’t run away fast enough.”

— Marie Brennan

8. “There is no faster way to harden my determination than to assume I will fail at something.”

— Marie Brennan

9. “It is not easy to fling oneself down stairs in a skirt; there is always the risk that you will tangle your legs and go headlong. But I made it.”

— Marie Brennan

10. “Nudity, I find, rapidly becomes boring when it is not treated as scandalous.”

— Marie Brennan

11. “They say there are no atheists in war; I tell you that pantheists abound at the edge of a cliff. I would have taken the blessing of any god I could get.”

— Marie Brennan

12. “Jake accompanied us as well, having arrived in Akhia shortly before the excavation team departed. I did not tell him our destination until we were safely away from civilization, and found my caution abundantly justified: he whooped and danced about so much, he fell off his camel and broke his left arm.”

— Marie Brennan

13. “There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have.”

— Marie Brennan

14. “Miriam snorted. It was not a very ladylike snort. She was the sort of woman one expected to find tramping the countryside in tweeds with a gun under her arm and a bulldog at her side, probably one of her own breeding.”

— Marie Brennan

15. “I sometimes imagine there is a clerk behind a desk situated between the brain and the mouth. It is his job to examine utterances on their way out, and stamp them with approval or send them back for reconsideration. If such a clerk exists, mine must be very harried and overworked; and on occasion he puts his head down on the desk in despair, letting things pass without so much as a second glance.”

— Marie Brennan

16. “Science is not separate from politics. As much as I would like it to be a pure thing, existing only in some intellectual realm unsullied by human struggle, it will always be entangled with the world we live in.”

— Marie Brennan

17. “I believed myself to be ready then; now, with the hindsight brought by greater age, I see myself for the naive and inexperienced young woman I was. We all begin in such a manner, though. There is no quick route to experience.”

— Marie Brennan

18. “Jake pried the head open, giving me a look when I warned him not to cut himself on the teeth. It is a look I think all children master at about his age – the one that insists the looker needs no warning while, by its very confidence, convincing the one looked at that the warning was very necessary indeed.”

— Marie Brennan

19. “Good manners warred with curiosity, and lost.”

— Marie Brennan

20. “But I know, at least, that you would keep a library on the subject, and I hoped that I might be allowed to read from it.” He regarded me with a bemused expression. “You want me for my library.”

— Marie Brennan

21. “Night is both blacker and more brilliant than you can imagine, and the sky a glory that puts to shame the most splendid jewels at Renwick’s.”

— Marie Brennan

22. “One does not cease to treasure a gem simply because one owns another that is larger.”

— Marie Brennan

23. “The hunt for spouses is an activity on a par with fox-hunting or hawking, though the weapons and dramatis personae differ. Just as grizzled old men know the habits of hares and quail, so do elegant society gossips know every titbit about the year’s eligible men and women.”

— Marie Brennan

24. “But rumour is a creature with many heads and no body, and I had no way to hunt it, any more than I could smooth over matters with my new relations.”

— Marie Brennan

25. “You may think you see plenty of stars, friend reader, but you are wrong. Night is both blacker and more brilliant than you can imagine, and the sky a glory that puts to shame the most splendid jewels at Renwick’s. Up in the mountains, where the air is crisper than the humid atmosphere of Scirland, I beheld a beauty I had never before seen.”

— Marie Brennan

26. “A husband willing to fund a library for his bookish wife is not so easy to obtain; most would see it as a pointless expense. You might, however, find one willing to share his library.”

— Marie Brennan

27. “At no point did I form the conscious intention of founding an ad hoc university in my sitting room. It happened, as it were, by accident.”

— Marie Brennan

28. “That should be my epitaph when I die ‘she did not have to do it’.”

— Marie Brennan

29. “It’s a wonderful feeling to have one’s brain stretched and tested, to know both that one has knowledge, and that one is gaining more.”

— Marie Brennan

30. “All hail that bane of the upper class, a scene. The spectre of being publicly shamed.”

— Marie Brennan

31. “There’s a bit of difference between swimming in shark-infested water because you’re trying to retrieve something from the bottom, and staying in just because you’re already there and haven’t been eaten yet.”

— Marie Brennan

32. “He was a man who did not properly exist in any single world, but he seemed to have found a place between them, and that, more than his past, was who he was.”

— Marie Brennan

33. “Give me dragons any day; I understand their ways far better than those of my fellow human beings. We make our world much too complicated.”

— Marie Brennan

34. “I find that respectability grows wearisome after a time, when one is accustomed to being a disgrace.”

— Marie Brennan

35. “I therefore had only enough fear to make myself terrified – not enough to turn back.”

— Marie Brennan

36. “The lack of a husband was, for some applicants, a selling point. I imagine many of my readers are aware of the awkward position in which governesses often find themselves – or, rather, the awkward position into which their male employers often put them, for it does no one any service to pretend this happens by some natural and inexorable process, devoid of connection with anyone’s behaviour.”

— Marie Brennan

37. “Jake shrugged, in the way that only nine-year-old children can manage – and usually male children at that, girls not being permitted the same kind of insouciance.”

— Marie Brennan

38. “Once we love, we cannot revoke it,′ she said. ‘We can only glory in what it brings – pain as well as joy, grief as well as hope.”

— Marie Brennan

39. “If you wish, gentle reader, you may augment your mental tableau with dramatic orchestral accompaniment.”

— Marie Brennan

40. “There are proverbs about frying pans and fires that I might have quoted to myself, but I preferred to adapt a different one to my purposes: better the devil that would attack everyone impartially than the devil specifically looking to kill us.”

— Marie Brennan

41. “So it has been, again and again throughout my life, as I form connections with people and then lose them to distance and time. I mourn those losses, even when I know my erstwhile friends are safe and happy among their own kin.”

— Marie Brennan

42. “Are a woman’s wishes only fit to be considered when blessed by a male relative?”

— Marie Brennan

43. “Consider what story you want to tell. Consider what tale should embody the spirit of our age, when people look back on this time. Will it be the tale of domination that some today sought to write? Or will it be the harmony whose passing my ancient brother immortalized in clay and gold?”

— Marie Brennan

44. “But my desire for knowledge was stronger than my religious sensibilities, which after all were more a matter of unthinking habit than real conviction.”

— Marie Brennan

45. “I spoke with the assurance of a young woman who thought her experience with natural history and ad hoc education in other subjects more than qualified her to hold forth on topics she knew nothing about at all. The truth is that any such comparison is far more complicated and doubtful than I presented it that evening; but it is also true that no one in my audience knew any more about it than I did, and most of them knew less. My assertion was therefore allowed to stand unchallenged. For.”

— Marie Brennan

46. “It is remarkable what children will accept as normal, especially when their experiences have been sufficiently broad.”

— Marie Brennan

47. “We stared at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter that must have scared off every nonhuman animal for half a mile around.”

— Marie Brennan

48. “Readers of these memoirs, know that I have never been very religious. I am not ashamed of this fact. I have endeavoured to be a good woman nonetheless, and to do good for those around me.”

— Marie Brennan

49. “Our home will eat you.”

— Marie Brennan