Top 140 Rachel Hartman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Nothing was just one thing; there were worlds within worlds. Those of us who trod the line between were blessed and burdened with both.”

— Rachel Hartman

102. “When the rest of the mind has fled, sometimes there’s music left.”

— Rachel Hartman

103. “There’s honest work to be done, Johnny,” whispered Griss. “The world is full of work, waiting for you.”

— Rachel Hartman

104. “I couldn’t work out how to get home. Someone moved the mountains.”

— Rachel Hartman

105. “Dragons aren’t good at metaphor.”

— Rachel Hartman

106. “It is permissible to be the god of your own metaphors.”

— Rachel Hartman

107. “All is well – or could be, if we worked to make it so. We were the fingers of the world, putting itself to rights.”

— Rachel Hartman

108. “There are two sacred causes in this world,” he said, holding up his pinkie and ring ringer. “Chance and necessity. By chance I was there to help when you had need.”

— Rachel Hartman

109. “The world is surprisingly hard to destroy.”

— Rachel Hartman

110. “Crisis first, love later.”

— Rachel Hartman

111. “To Tess’s immeasurable disappointment, she woke up.”

— Rachel Hartman

112. “If you have a personality, you’re a person.”

— Rachel Hartman

113. “Tess trembled so hard her teeth chattered. “So it is with the body,” said the nun, eyes narrowing fiercely. “The hated innocent becomes hateful. Goodness withers when it is continuously ground underfoot. We fulfill our parents’ direst prophecies, then curl around our own pain until we can’t see beyond ourselves.”

— Rachel Hartman

114. “A single action could derive from many motivations. I should never assume.”

— Rachel Hartman

115. “It was hard to fool someone who could tell what you were thinking.”

— Rachel Hartman

116. “Thou mayest reach Heaven only by the mercy of the fallen.”

— Rachel Hartman

117. “The road was possibility, the kind she’d thought her life would never hold again, and Tess herself was motion. Motion had no past, only future. Any direction you walked was forward, and that was as must be.”

— Rachel Hartman

118. “Don’t be afraid. We’re walking away from death, not toward it. Death is going back.”

— Rachel Hartman

119. “We would plan and negotiate and build our own way forward.”

— Rachel Hartman

120. “Your life is not a tragedy. It’s history, and it’s yours.”

— Rachel Hartman

121. “Belief was uniquely human.”

— Rachel Hartman

122. “More insomniacs!′ cried the doctor. ‘Come in, come in”.”

— Rachel Hartman

123. “If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitable end up at a point of illogic, an article of faith? Even an indisputable fact must be chosen as the place to start reasoning, given weight by a mind that believed in its worth.”

— Rachel Hartman

124. “He smiled sadly, then placed his hand around mine so we were holding the book together. “I believe that – with everything I have,” he said, holding my gaze. He kissed the edge of the book because he could not kiss me.”

— Rachel Hartman

125. “Tess had been unaware of leaving anything behind, but to hear Jacomo tell it, he’d played a long, slow game of connect-the-dots, and each dot had been a kindness, farm chores, laughter, a story told. She’d passed through the world, and the world had remembered.”

— Rachel Hartman

126. “A keen wit stabs harder than a finely honed argument.”

— Rachel Hartman

127. “It’s more like... she has grown too big and feels trapped in her own skin.”

— Rachel Hartman

128. “It was a place that wasn’t a place, an inside that surrounded the outside.”

— Rachel Hartman

129. “No penance could be more terrible than this. Her very heart was dead.”

— Rachel Hartman

130. “People stood at the edge, gaping foolishly, because they didn’t believe it. The chasm was too big to understand.”

— Rachel Hartman

131. “But do not make the mistake, Seraphina, of supposing that suffering ennobles anyone.”

— Rachel Hartman

132. “I – I value your continued existence.”

— Rachel Hartman

133. “You’re stronger than you were when it happened.”

— Rachel Hartman

134. “Love is a worthy motivation, although you see how quickly it can sour into guilt.”

— Rachel Hartman

135. “No matter how much you wanted to do right in this world, the world would find a way to crush you.”

— Rachel Hartman

136. “From some angles, up is toward the earth and down toward the sky, and everything – people, horses, cathedrals, dreams – is suspended over the ceaseless void, barely hanging on.”

— Rachel Hartman

137. “There’s nothing “just” about stories. Stories are the most real.”

— Rachel Hartman

138. “His hair had clearly been up all night having adventures without him.”

— Rachel Hartman

139. “Only when we have carved you into pieces can you be whole again.”

— Rachel Hartman

140. “Beggars, alas, could not be choosers.”

— Rachel Hartman

141. “It matters less where you go than that you keep moving.”

— Rachel Hartman

142. “Claude rubs the back of his neck and wrinkles his nose, about to tell me he was never sad. I believe this is called bravado and is not limited to lawyers, or even men, although that combination makes it almost unavoidable.”

— Rachel Hartman

143. “O faithless ignoramus, denier of Heaven Sitting smugly upon a disbelieving bottom O blatant person who disregards the scriptures Standing confidently in a puddle of sin There shall be smiting with lightning And blood-soaked retribution And heads kicked about like footballs And much worse upon your wretched person When Golden Abaster returns with judgment for you And salvation in the form of flowers for the rest of us Rodya.”

— Rachel Hartman

144. “Do not bring violence to the sword. Do not bring heartbreak or anger or passion. You hold in your hand the steel of rationality.”

— Rachel Hartman