Top 140 Rachel Hartman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.”

— Rachel Hartman

2. “I cannot perch among those who think that I am broken.”

— Rachel Hartman

3. “You won’t like hearing this, but sometimes you can’t fix what you broke. Sometimes you just have to live with it.”

— Rachel Hartman

4. “Sometimes the truth has difficulty breaching the city walls of our beliefs. A lie, dressed in the correct livery, passes through more easily.”

— Rachel Hartman

5. “For future reference: do not underestimate the seductive power of math.”

— Rachel Hartman

6. “Love and guilt are like ham and eggs. So many people enjoy them together, but there’s no rule saying you must have one with the other. They don’t even come from the same animal.”

— Rachel Hartman

7. “Maybe the world isn’t really different, but I am different, and I am in the world.”

— Rachel Hartman

8. “Invisible factors in my life would inevitably lead to my downfall. I felt I had known this all along. There was no escape.”

— Rachel Hartman

9. “Your very presence makes other people feel awkward. You stand out when in fact you’d rather not.”

— Rachel Hartman

10. “We name something to make it real, to give it meaning.”

— Rachel Hartman

11. “Walk with me – I won’t let you fall.”

— Rachel Hartman

12. “I was drawn to his aloofness, the way cats gravitate toward people who’d rather avoid them.”

— Rachel Hartman

13. “The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods.”

— Rachel Hartman

14. “That’s the secret to performance: conviction. The right note played tentatively still misses its mark, but play boldly and no one will question you. If one believes there is truth in art – and I do – then it’s troubling how similar the skill of performing is to lying. Maybe lying is itself a kind of art. I think about that more than I should.”

— Rachel Hartman

15. “First, I gave you two choices as a test: there are never just two choices. That is a lie to keep you from thinking too deeply. Second, and more important: the body is innocent. Deeply, beautifully, fundamentally innocent.”

— Rachel Hartman

16. “However strenuously the world pulls us apart, however long the absence, we are not changed for being dashed upon the rocks. I knew you then, I know you now, I shall know you again when you come home.”

— Rachel Hartman

17. “This is my mind’s garden, I tend it; I order it. I have nothing to fear.”

— Rachel Hartman

18. “We curl around our own pain until we can’t see beyond ourselves. You want to walk on? Walk out of that shadow.”

— Rachel Hartman

19. “Thus ended Tess’s short career in herpevangelism.”

— Rachel Hartman

20. “I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.”

— Rachel Hartman

21. “The body is innocent. Deeply, beautifully, fundamentally innocent.”

— Rachel Hartman

22. “Her fierce blue eyes met mine only for a second, but in that fragile eternity I glimpsed the mind behind the manners; in that endless instant, I knew.”

— Rachel Hartman

23. “She was the river, and the river had nothing to be ashamed of.”

— Rachel Hartman

24. “What’s a mother for but to be blamed?”

— Rachel Hartman

25. “My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.”

— Rachel Hartman

26. “For a fleeting instant, in the sad curve of his shoulders, I saw what Comonot could not: the core of decency; the weight he had carried so long; the endless struggle to do right in the wake of this irreversible wrong; the grieving husband and frightened father; the author of all those love songs. For the first time, I understood.”

— Rachel Hartman

27. “I saw what they thought of you,” said Mother Philomela, her voice gentling. “I rejoiced that you’d struck out on your own, but you’ve a long way to go still. Your kindness toward this one, when you needn’t have troubled yourself” – she gestured at Griss – “shows me the true heart of you. Your credo goes further than you realized: walk on, yes, but don’t walk past people who need you. Uncurl yourself so you can see them and respond.”

— Rachel Hartman

28. “There was a great brightness and, um... Imagine what it would look like if you could see music, or thought.”

— Rachel Hartman

29. “She still held sorrows, but she was not made of them. Her life was not a tragedy. It was a history, and it was hers.”

— Rachel Hartman

30. “Love is not a disease.”

— Rachel Hartman

31. “It was astonishing how much meaning could be crammed into a single word. How did such words not crumble under their own weight?”

— Rachel Hartman

32. “One foot in front of the other was all she could manage.”

— Rachel Hartman

33. “We are adrift, and the thinnest breeze may blow us where it will.”

— Rachel Hartman

34. “The future would come, full of war and uncertainty, but I would not be facing it alone. I had love and work, friends and a people. I had a place to stand.”

— Rachel Hartman

35. “Let the ones who seek justice be just.”

— Rachel Hartman

36. “Sir James waved a gnarled hand. “They’re nothing but feral file clerks, dragons. They used to alphabetize the coins in their hoards.”

— Rachel Hartman

37. “I gave you two choices as a test: there are never just two choices. That is a lie to keep you from thinking too deeply.”

— Rachel Hartman

38. “Interpretation gives knowledge value, but it must evolve as new knowledge emerges. From a myriad incomplete truth, a greater whole.”

— Rachel Hartman

39. “I experienced every wing beat as a terrifying drop followed by a stomach-lurching heave. I was sick over a glacier. Brisi watched with interest and screeched, “A thousand years from now, that will still be there, frozen in the ice. Unless a quig eats it.”

— Rachel Hartman

40. “If it can be known, I want to know it.”

— Rachel Hartman

41. “I became the very air; I was full of stars. I was the soaring spaces between the spires of the cathedral, the solemn breath of chimneys, a whispered prayer upon the winter wind. I was silence, and I was music, one clear transcendent chord rising toward Heaven.”

— Rachel Hartman

42. “You will wander the dark places under the earth, but you will come back with the sun.”

— Rachel Hartman

43. “Here’s an analogy I like: guilt is a runaway wagon down the mountainside. It may carry you a long way, but it usually ends in disaster. Love, on the other hand, is much slower – just your own two feet, really,” she said, casting a meaningful look at Tess. ‘But it’s more likely to take you somewhere worth going.”

— Rachel Hartman

44. “One thing I’ve learned about grief: it’s like a creditor’s bill. You can put off paying, but it eventually falls due, and exacts usurious interest.”

— Rachel Hartman

45. “You can’t walk away without also walking towards.”

— Rachel Hartman

46. “Haven’t you always been more than yourself? Haven’t we all? We are none of us just one thing.”

— Rachel Hartman

47. “Experiencing nothingness had left her feeling unexpectedly full.”

— Rachel Hartman

48. “Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar’s level and was muttering in his ear. “Do you feel the breeze on your face?” I heard her say. “That’s yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there’s such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky.”

— Rachel Hartman

49. “For me, art is the desire to preserve the intangible feeling of such a moment, hidden in all the littlest details, and then to communicate that to others.”

— Rachel Hartman

50. “True love was a time-honored way of escaping nearly everything – ogres, witches, bandits, tedious obligations. Her parents wouldn’t like it, but surely even they had to acknowledge that love conquered all.”

— Rachel Hartman