Top 140 Rachel Hartman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The beauty of the place moved me; I loved how the clean air felt in my lungs, how far I was from everything I had ever known. People I’d hurt, people I’d failed, people who thought me a monster. Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.”

— Rachel Hartman

52. “Are you in love with Prince Lucian?′ screamed my uncle. ‘What were you up to when I arrived? You weren’t going to mate right here in the snow, were you?”

— Rachel Hartman

53. “This is my road. I’m so happy you came and traveled with me.”

— Rachel Hartman

54. “Tess had thought her grandmother, somewhat poetically, as having come unbuttoned from time.”

— Rachel Hartman

55. “The thing about reason is that there’s a geometry to it. It travels in a straight line, so that slightly different beginnings can lead you to wildly divergent endpoints.”

— Rachel Hartman

56. “The most useful virtues, for one who walked on, were flexibility and a willingness to improvise.”

— Rachel Hartman

57. “That was basic hound logic, learned from Faffy: if you ran, you were prey.”

— Rachel Hartman

58. “Walk on, yes, but don’t walk away from people who need you.”

— Rachel Hartman

59. “This is our lot. Is that what your getting at? And one must choose to walk on, rather that petulantly sitting on one’s rump and pouting?”

— Rachel Hartman

60. “How was the wolf to blame, if the sheep were roaming free?”

— Rachel Hartman

61. “How could he forgive her if he didn’t know she’d wronged him? How could she assuage her guilt without his forgiveness?”

— Rachel Hartman

62. “There is no pain – free path, sweet girl. Choosing is what makes like bearable.”

— Rachel Hartman

63. “We won’t know what hit us, because we’ll be dead; or we will know, and we’ll die in protracted agony. There’s no point worrying about it beforehand.”

— Rachel Hartman

64. “Anyway, it wasn’t that flavor of love. She could leave and carry it with her. Time would not put a dent in it, nor distance snuff it out.”

— Rachel Hartman

65. “The world is seldom so simple that it hinges on us alone.”

— Rachel Hartman

66. “I did not understand that I carried loneliness before me on a plate, and that music would be the light illuminating me from behind.”

— Rachel Hartman

67. “What if opposites could be combined and transcended, paradox embraced, a whole life lived in contradictory case?”

— Rachel Hartman

68. “There’s a room in my heart full of unpaid bills. We all have one. It’s useful to go in occasionally and open a few.”

— Rachel Hartman

69. “We would be going to war for peace.”

— Rachel Hartman

70. “For a moment Tess imagined she didn’t exist. It was surprisingly soothing.”

— Rachel Hartman

71. “I can’t pretend to know what will happen. But I’ve been called: I’ve got to go. You know what that’s like. You answered the call of your boots.”

— Rachel Hartman

72. “The borderlands of madness used to have much sterner signage around them than they do now.”

— Rachel Hartman

73. “What was rage but a cover for some secret fragility, some sorrow?”

— Rachel Hartman

74. “The Ninysh might have resisted a bit harder. I don’t mean to imply that they were cowards... ,” Maurizio said shrugging, clearly implying that the Ninysh were cowards.”

— Rachel Hartman

75. “Playing flute was the one thing I knew could make people see a human, not a monster.”

— Rachel Hartman

76. “I think I can show them the path out. I understand now that it’s not a question of faith or hope; it exists, and we can find it. It’s going to take some time, though.”

— Rachel Hartman

77. “Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.”

— Rachel Hartman

78. “Some sober part of my brain seemed to observe everything I did, clucking disdainfully, informing me that ought to be embarrassed, yet making no move.”

— Rachel Hartman

79. “That’s why this is important: because it’s impossible.”

— Rachel Hartman

80. “My companions ate the bear. I found I had no appetite.”

— Rachel Hartman

81. “The hated innocent becomes hateful. Goodness withers when it is continuously ground underfoot.”

— Rachel Hartman

82. “Once you glimpsed the truth about yourself, your understanding was complete and you could finally be at piece.”

— Rachel Hartman

83. “Music is only work when someone else makes you do it.”

— Rachel Hartman

84. “I do what I have always done. I reach across and bring the worlds together.”

— Rachel Hartman

85. “We shall have long meetings where Kiggs agonizes and Glisselda teases him. That’s the pattern so far.”

— Rachel Hartman

86. “We try to do right, and we... we... they gang up on us, fear and pain and revenge and... and then we find we’ve done wrong.”

— Rachel Hartman

87. “I understood something about myself as well, even if I didn’t have the will to examine it just then.”

— Rachel Hartman

88. “It looked like our gods, to me – not literally, no the way they are depicted in statues, but the vibrant space between them, where Necessity is Chance and Chance flows into Necessity. The world is as it must be, and as it happens to be, and those are the same thing, connected and right, and you understand and love all of it, because you are all of it and all of it is you.”

— Rachel Hartman

89. “I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing “just” about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.”

— Rachel Hartman

90. “Sometimes everyone does their best and things still go wrong.”

— Rachel Hartman

91. “Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that’s like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.”

— Rachel Hartman

92. “Dying took commitment. It was easier to go on living incompetently.”

— Rachel Hartman

93. “He chuckled into my hair, enjoying this. I loved him terribly just then, how he puzzled through obscure scholarship and reveled in ideas, never mind that he’d called my mind hell.”

— Rachel Hartman

94. “I think I’ve heard that ballad,” I said. “It’s beautiful but it ends sadly.”

— Rachel Hartman

95. “The darkness was full, fuller than she would ever have guessed, and she found this curiously comforting.”

— Rachel Hartman

96. “He steadied himself with one great hand against the city wall. He had told me he’d never stop growing. He’d meant it literally. What had I been addressing all these years? His finger?”

— Rachel Hartman

97. “The world is surprisingly hard to destroy, whereas saving it can be done a bit at a time.”

— Rachel Hartman

98. “Around us the darkness hovered tenderly. We passed through it.”

— Rachel Hartman

99. “The twin gods, Necessity and Chance, walked among the stars. What needed to be, was; what might be, sometimes was.”

— Rachel Hartman

100. “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