Top 35 Sonya Hartnett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Let me fly, let me see things that are hidden from other eyes.”

— Sonya Hartnett

2. “There’s fire in my fingers. I burn everything I touch.”

— Sonya Hartnett

3. “You’re not supposed to have iron bars around you – no one is supposed to have that. You’re supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That’s what happens when you’re alive.”

— Sonya Hartnett

Featured in: Lonely Quotes, Rain Quotes

4. “Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.”

— Sonya Hartnett

5. “Words on the page are never prisoners of the page.”

— Sonya Hartnett

6. “My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she’d let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don’t make me go.”

— Sonya Hartnett

7. “Yeah, reflections! The same, but different. Like twins – like blood brothers! And when you need something bad done, like punishment or revenge, you’ll just ask me, and I will do it -.”

— Sonya Hartnett

8. “I am dying: it’s a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.”

— Sonya Hartnett

9. “It is scary, sometimes, Tomas admitted. But the scary bits are what make you brave.”

— Sonya Hartnett

10. “Life is lived on the inside. What’s outside doesn’t matter.”

— Sonya Hartnett

11. “I would always be lonely, but no more alone.”

— Sonya Hartnett

12. “Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.”

— Sonya Hartnett

13. “In the quest for power, truth is always the first thing left behind.”

— Sonya Hartnett

14. “I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind’s history must be scored bloody with heartbreak. This hankering for affection is a blight upon us.”

— Sonya Hartnett

15. “A small town has as many eyes as a fly.”

— Sonya Hartnett

16. “I suppose that’s what happens when you make other people’s lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.”

— Sonya Hartnett

17. “A small town is nothing but eyes and gaping maw; it pecks at its own like a flock of vicious birds.”

— Sonya Hartnett

18. “She doesn’t understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings – they’re helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.”

— Sonya Hartnett

19. “More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader’s heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.”

— Sonya Hartnett

20. “There is nothing that is more beautiful than everything else in the world.”

— Sonya Hartnett

21. “Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that’s sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.”

— Sonya Hartnett

22. “Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.”

— Sonya Hartnett

23. “But what she feels is sometimes hard to express... Much of what is best in her is warped on the voyage from within to without.”

— Sonya Hartnett

24. “How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?”

— Sonya Hartnett

25. “Strange how love coexists with hate, how they render eachother mute, how the swilling of them together makes a new and softer, sympathetic thing.”

— Sonya Hartnett

26. “She despised the sadness that hung inside her like old lace.”

— Sonya Hartnett

27. “He’s used to the freedom of neglect; he likes it.”

— Sonya Hartnett

28. “She is not a musical girl nor, intrinsically, a joyful girl; but the music of the four Swedes shook something awake inside her, and when she heard it she felt airborne and strong.”

— Sonya Hartnett

29. “Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him.”

— Sonya Hartnett

30. “He is dirt under fingernails and the stick of sap on skin... I am saintly, poetic; I am demise, otherworld.”

— Sonya Hartnett

31. “I love you,” she told him, and he knew that this was true, and she knew that he believed her; but when she said it she saw the chain around his ankle, a length of links that let him wander, but not far. She did not see the chain around her own ankle, because love is blind.”

— Sonya Hartnett

32. “I want my life to be mystifying,” she declared, although she didn’t know what she meant.”

— Sonya Hartnett

33. “God loves old dogs.”

— Sonya Hartnett

34. “I sensed that he was dead, but wasn’t sure if death was forever. It seemed best to stay nearby, in case the chance came to make everything changed.”

— Sonya Hartnett

35. “I fail to see how turning the subject over like compost can do anything except raise its stink.”

— Sonya Hartnett