Top 35 Sarah Monette Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The fountain of youth is like the monkeys paw in the W. W. Jacobs story. It never ends well.”

— Sarah Monette

2. “I want to make love to you. Will you let me?”

— Sarah Monette

3. “The dead person is not truly dead until the last person who rememebers them dies.”

— Sarah Monette

4. “I catch a flash of red-gold beneath the surface of the water, and realize that there are koi in the pond, massive, serene, and I wonder: are they dreams of fish, or fish who dream?”

— Sarah Monette

5. “What makes a story a story is that something changes. Internal, external, small or large, trivial or of earth-shattering importance. Doesn’t matter.”

— Sarah Monette

6. “The river runs through the heart of the city, and braiding around and over and under the river, the city’s rail system is a welter of tarnished silver ribbons.”

— Sarah Monette

7. “I gave up on cussing – I’d run out of words filthy enough – and just started praying.”

— Sarah Monette

8. “Beyond the window, snow fell like frozen drops of poison.”

— Sarah Monette

9. “Consider the stars. Among them are no passions, no wars. They know neither love nor hatred. Did man but emulate the stars, would not his soul become clear and radiant as they are? But man’s spirit draws him like a moth to the ephemera of this world, and in their heat he is consumed entire.”

— Sarah Monette

10. “It is a rose planted in your heart, and as it’s thorns tear you, so does it thrive and flower.”

— Sarah Monette

11. “His eyes were green and cold and brilliant with murder.”

— Sarah Monette

12. “It’s like you got to have everybody’s heart, and if they don’t give it, you rip it out and watch it bleed.”

— Sarah Monette

13. “What you’re asking me to do is monstrous.” “So? Ain’t we both monsters?”

— Sarah Monette

14. “I miss my fox-headed brother. Keeper.”

— Sarah Monette

15. “I’m a cat burglar.”

— Sarah Monette

16. “At home, it was part of my life that Ivo was always watching me, unblinking, the slits of his pupils expanding and contracting as a cat’s do when it considers whether or not to pounce on its prey.”

— Sarah Monette

17. “As she became more honest with herself, her writing matured, so that one could catch glimpses of what would emerge from its chrysalis as a poet’s genius.”

— Sarah Monette

18. “There were so many lies, all of them precious, all of them necessary.”

— Sarah Monette

19. “I do not like children. I do not know how to speak to them. They frightened and confused me when I was a child myself, and they frighten and confuse me now that I am an adult.”

— Sarah Monette

20. “I heard the clicking of hells, like the tapping of tiny hooves, and there appeared in front of me two, tiny withered crones. I thought I had to be dreaming still, for they were identical, dressed in the same dark red, with small, black, cunning eyes in their pale, wrinkled faces. They looked as if they put up their silvery-white hair in its coiled braids using each other as a mirror, and there were long, dangling earrings of marcasite and jet.”

— Sarah Monette

21. “The picture that emerged from Mildred’s entries was of a pretty, charming, willful child who was accustomed to get her own way with the confidence of an empress.”

— Sarah Monette

22. “He rolled the syllables of my name out of his mouth as if they were at once contemptible and marvelous.”

— Sarah Monette

23. “Amelia Stapleton had frozen herself in a kind artificial girlhood which apparently resonated with the ghost of Georgiana Truelove. In fact, I saw a dreadful symmetry between the two: both of them unable to grow up, both of them preserved like insects in amber at this point of trauma, where their lives ended-Miss Stapleton’s only metaphorically, but Georgiana Truelove’s with a most dreadful literality.”

— Sarah Monette

24. “He touched my face; I could feel the heat of his fingers, and this time I did not flinch away, although I was trembling.”

— Sarah Monette

25. “I did not know how to help her; I was not the hero for whom she waited, the man whose touch could dissolve the wall around her and set her free.”

— Sarah Monette

26. “The hotel was a blazing citadel, a palace of electricity in the city’s cold gloom.”

— Sarah Monette

27. “This was merely the malignant hand of coincidence.”

— Sarah Monette

28. “He walked like a conqueror, like a lion. He could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. His eyes were not merely vivid blue; they were intense, blazing, as if they were lit from within, as if this young man was bringing a flame that no one else could feel. His mouth was twisted in a mocking smile. He had known I would look.”

— Sarah Monette

29. “I suppose she was pretty-at least everyone seemed to think so-but her mouth was small and ungenerous, and her eyes was hard. Her voice was high-pitched and always rather breathless, and she lisped slightly. The quality of her voice was childlike, innocent, and that was a deception worthy of the Serpent in Eden.”

— Sarah Monette

30. “Like many predators, boys hunt in packs.”

— Sarah Monette

31. “I could see her blush, even through her tan, but her eyes were steady and unapologetic.”

— Sarah Monette

32. “Asking why the creature had chosen to give me its bone was pointless. My foolish and unwilling foray into necromancy had made me attractive to such things, as a magnetic is attractive to iron.”

— Sarah Monette

33. “A room more clearly meant to delight the heart of a bibliophile I could not imagine.”

— Sarah Monette

34. “I had neither proof nor explanation, only that mad inner surety that I suspect is characteristic of all those who hear voices in an empty room, whether those voices be spectral or merely delusional.”

— Sarah Monette

35. “Ivo sat and listened, the look in his blue eyes enrapt and I knew, though I could hardly believe it, that he was not bored or uninterested, that to him I mattered as I had never mattered to anyone in my life.”

— Sarah Monette

36. “The museum may lose things,” I said, “but it never throws them away.”

— Sarah Monette