Top 35 Samantha Harvey Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Why can’t time go backwards as well as forward? If time’s not a river but a circle, and if you can travel round a circle one way or another and end up where you started, why can’t it go this way and that?”

— Samantha Harvey

2. “Nothing had changed since those days except that everything had degraded and two decades of light had beaten the colours back a shade.”

— Samantha Harvey

3. “The mind is a prison. And when we write the noise is distilled and alchemised, and the self can find a way out, which I think is what love is – the escape of the self from the self.”

— Samantha Harvey

4. “It is not for us to try to change the world to something that suits us better, but for us to change, to bend to a greater weight.”

— Samantha Harvey

5. “It reminded me that, for all that you love to call a spade a spade, the spade is always a symbol for something else.”

— Samantha Harvey

6. “This must be grace, to be defeated by one’s better nature.”

— Samantha Harvey

7. “How do you tell the difference between a person made of flesh and one made of words?”

— Samantha Harvey

8. “This is what writing does to you, it seems, it turns objects that used to be just things in your life into things that must be described, and at the same time makes them feel increasingly indescribable.”

— Samantha Harvey

9. “You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days.”

— Samantha Harvey

10. “She paused; her speech was ever thus. Spirals of deepening particulars, then pauses when she saw she’d strayed from the point.”

— Samantha Harvey

11. “If the mind is a cacophony, the subconscious is silent theatre.”

— Samantha Harvey

12. “Writing is lucid dreaming – the work of the subconscious that has a toe in the conscious, just enough to harness the dream’s waywardness. I always heard it said that writing draws on the subconscious, but that isn’t true. It is the subconscious, and it draws on the conscious.”

— Samantha Harvey

13. “Poetry can turn phrases that rotate the world, too small a rotation to cause a public commotion but enough to knock a solitary life a fraction off its axis, such that it will never be the same again.”

— Samantha Harvey

14. “To write fiction you have to engage in organised fraud, the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words.”

— Samantha Harvey

15. “What an unlikely wonder is life, that it holds in itself the whole wildness of death – those bacteria didn’t come into life at the point of death, they were always there and they always wanted to eat you, and your cells always contained in them the enzymes that would assist your rotting. It was only ever your vehemence to survive that prevented all that. Did you know, were you ever able to detect within, the passionate warfare that kept you here?”

— Samantha Harvey

16. “We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf.”

— Samantha Harvey

17. “Maybe we’re the new dinosaurs and need to watch out.”

— Samantha Harvey

18. “The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.”

— Samantha Harvey

19. “Because who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful?”

— Samantha Harvey

20. “The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.”

— Samantha Harvey

21. “Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.”

— Samantha Harvey

22. “Maybe one day we’ll look in the mirror and be happy with the fair-to-middling upright ape that eyes us back, and we’ll gather our breath and think: OK, we’re alone, so be it. Maybe that day is coming soon. Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.”

— Samantha Harvey

23. “And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.”

— Samantha Harvey

24. “The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.”

— Samantha Harvey

25. “Why would you do this? Trying to live where you can never thrive? Trying to go where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does. He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude. If this weird hot longing makes him a hero or an idiot. Undoubtedly something just short of either.”

— Samantha Harvey

26. “The night is itself without narrative – the way the hours move, less like a stream flowing somewhere and more like water swilling in a shallow pool, until suddenly the pool is drained and it’s morning.”

— Samantha Harvey

27. “Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.”

— Samantha Harvey

28. “But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments – and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.”

— Samantha Harvey

29. “It’s only at night when you sleep that you’re relieved of this perpetual treadmill. And even when you sleep you feel the earth turning, just as you feel a person lying next to you. You feel it there. You feel all the days that break through your seven-hour night. You feel all the fizzing stars and the moods of the oceans and the lurch of the light through your skin, and if the earth were to pause for a second on its orbit, you’d wake with a start knowing something was wrong.”

— Samantha Harvey

30. “He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude.”

— Samantha Harvey

31. “Maybe human civilisation is like a single life – we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flush of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special then we might not be alone.”

— Samantha Harvey

32. “Just repeat the mantra as you go: slow is smooth and smooth is fast, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

— Samantha Harvey

33. “The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.”

— Samantha Harvey

34. “Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it.”

— Samantha Harvey

35. “Because who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful? Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity.”

— Samantha Harvey