Top 200 Tamsyn Muir Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow – but she had died before Harrow was born.”

— Tamsyn Muir

52. “Idiot.” Harrowhark’s voice was distant and full of badly suppressed adrenaline. “Here. Take this veil.” Gideon kept mopping at her eyes. “I’m all good.” “I said put it on. I’m not having you struck blind when the door opens.” “I came prepared, my sweet.” “What are you even saying half the time –.”

— Tamsyn Muir

53. “I didn’t think this was the time for dirty talk, but I can roll with it,” she said. “Choke me, Daddy.”

— Tamsyn Muir

54. “The House of the First had been abandoned, and breathlessly waited to be used by someone other than time.”

— Tamsyn Muir

55. “Then we’re all dead, Nav, but let’s bring hell first,′ said Harrow. Gideon looked over her shoulder at her, and caught the Reverend Daughter’s smile. There was blood sweat coming out of her left ear, but her smile was long and sweet and beautiful. Gideon found herself smiling back so hard her mouth hurt.”

— Tamsyn Muir

56. “You’ve got two scientists and an engineer and a nun and a lawyer and a banker and a cop and an artist. That’s not a defence force, that’s a cop and six different kinds of nerd.”

— Tamsyn Muir

57. “My necromancer and I always liked you... and hey, what’s like except a love that hasn’t been invited indoors?”

— Tamsyn Muir

58. “Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.”

— Tamsyn Muir

59. “I understand you didn’t ask on purpose, but I like to think that there was a grain in your soul that saw yourself in need, and perhaps thought to itself, I wish I had Abigail Pent.”

— Tamsyn Muir

60. “He sighed and said, “We had the internet. We decided to stream.” She said, “What is this internet?” And he said, “See, I did make a utopia.”

— Tamsyn Muir

61. “And the other child said: Then perish.”

— Tamsyn Muir

62. “Oh, this is boring,” Gideon had said in disappointment. “I wanted one with a skull puking another, smaller skull, and other skulls flying all around. But tasteful, you know?”

— Tamsyn Muir

63. “Ortus wasn’t made in his mould. Coupling him to Harrow had been rather like yoking a doughnut to a cobra.”

— Tamsyn Muir

64. “He gave the impression of being the guy fun sought out for death.”

— Tamsyn Muir

65. “Why are you not appeased? That is how meat loves meat.”

— Tamsyn Muir

66. “Someday I’ll die and get buried in the ground and you can take it up with me then,′ said Harrow, and found, after all, that she was not really speaking to them. ‘Until then – I am afraid that I have to live.”

— Tamsyn Muir

67. “He didn’t even ask me to explain. That was the kind of guy he was. He and I had grown up on the same street. I’d spotted him for mince pies all the time as kids, so stands to reason he let me cut off his arm and carried a nuke for me.”

— Tamsyn Muir

68. “So we’re talking about ghosts, and liminal spaces, and hell,” Ianthe said. Ianthe always wanted everything brought back to liminal spaces and hell, as though her rooms were not enough.”

— Tamsyn Muir

69. “Alas. I have a bad personality and a stupefying deficit of attention.”

— Tamsyn Muir

70. “I died knowing you’d hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.”

— Tamsyn Muir

71. “I’d aim to get out of here alive, but our odds don’t look wonderful. If we stay put, we get squashed, or eaten. If we swim, we probably still get squashed or eaten.”

— Tamsyn Muir

72. “I need you to hide my infirmity,” said Harrowhark. “You see, I am insane.”

— Tamsyn Muir

73. “I have lots of fealty in me. I fealt the Emperor with every bone in my body. I fealt hard.”

— Tamsyn Muir

74. “What do Marta the Second, Naberius the Third, Jeannemary the Fourth, Magnus the Fifth, Camilla the Sixth, Protesilaus the Seventh, Colum the Eighth, and Gideon the Ninth all have in common?” You could have heard a hair flutter to the floor. Everyone stared, poker-faced, in the thick ensuing silence. Magnus looked pleased with himself. “The same middle name,” he said.”

— Tamsyn Muir

75. “Every so often she wondered if she had, in fact, kicked the bucket and this was her afterlife: wandering empty halls with a half-naked, chastened Harrowhark Nonagesimus who had no recourse but to be gentle with her, handling her as though at any moment she would explode into wet confetti giblets.”

— Tamsyn Muir

76. “She was consumed. She was the kindling for the arson taking place in her heart, her brain dry wadding for the flames, her soul so much incandescent gas. She could not do this. She absolutely and fundamentally could not do this.”

— Tamsyn Muir

77. “You didn’t have your original thumb and I’d touched your intestines, which is usually what, fourth date, but you were fine.”

— Tamsyn Muir

78. “If you think anything I did, I did to make her love me, then you don’t know anything about her and me. I’m her cavalier, dipshit! I’d kill for her! I’d die for her! I did die for her. I’d do anything she needed, anything at all, before she even knew she needed it. I’m her sword, you pasty-faced Coronabeth-looking knock-off.”

— Tamsyn Muir

79. “Abigail Pent has been interfered with and opened up.” “Please elaborate opened up, because my imagination is better than your description and I am not having a lot of fun here,” said Gideon.”

— Tamsyn Muir

80. “That I’m beautiful?” said Nona. “No. About the Angel. The Angel’s worried.” “Okay,” said Nona. “Stay on the grounds today,” said Hot Sauce. “When you take Noodle.”

— Tamsyn Muir

81. “Yes, well, jail for Mother,” I said.”

— Tamsyn Muir

82. “Love is a revenant, and it accumulates love-stuff to itself, because it is homeless otherwise.”

— Tamsyn Muir

83. “Your tolerance for man-eating magma fish would have been tested sorely by anyone who was not God. His divinity earned God, you thought, about sixty more seconds.”

— Tamsyn Muir

84. “It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.”

— Tamsyn Muir

85. “But nobody listened to us. Nobody investigated the things we told them to investigate. Everyone showed us what looked like evidence to them, and when we argued back they reminded us that cows had best friends and complex social relationships.”

— Tamsyn Muir

86. “Then Nona tried to put the shoes on Noodle. It was by far the most difficult thing she had ever attempted.”

— Tamsyn Muir

87. “Harrowhark’s talent had always been in scale, in making a fully realised construct from as little as an arm bone or a pelvis, able to make an army of them from what anyone else would need for one, and in some far-off way Gideon had always known that this would be how she went: gangbanged to death by skeletons.”

— Tamsyn Muir

88. “The letter was wrapped around a black, folded-up bunch of angles: smoked glass, thin black frames, mirrored lenses. A little bend in one arm, but otherwise – you’d kept my sunglasses.”

— Tamsyn Muir

89. “You could have lived for her... but didn’t know how.”

— Tamsyn Muir

90. “Harrow’s face was bright with elation and fervour. Gideon would have sworn there were tears in her eyes, except that no such liquid existed: Harrow was a desiccated mummy of hate.”

— Tamsyn Muir

91. “She had found a nasty, forbidden little book in the great Ninth repositories of nasty, forbidden little books, and all the Houses would have had a collective aneurysm if they knew she’d even read it.”

— Tamsyn Muir

92. “Ask me how I am and I’ll scream,” she said. “How are you,” said Camilla, who was a pill. “I see you calling my bluff and I resent it,” said Gideon.”

— Tamsyn Muir

93. “Nothing particularly interesting happened, until Camilla burst into flames.”

— Tamsyn Muir

94. “Your greatest peace you found in that half-asleep, druglike state on the bed, holding your heartbeat low before the cold white stars, sick with a fury you kept forgetting existed and were corrupted by possessing. Around you, people would go back and forth, giving you the widest berth possible, ignoring you so entirely that at one point you were convinced you were dead. With that conviction, you had felt only intense relief.”

— Tamsyn Muir

95. “They all looked to Harrow, as though on fatal cue: legends, soldiers, poets, Magnus.”

— Tamsyn Muir

96. “Harrow was too amazed by her body’s expanding capacity for despair. It was as though her feeling had doubled even as she looked at it, unfolding, like falling down an endless flight of stairs. She dug her hands into the mattress and she cried for Gideon Nav.”

— Tamsyn Muir

97. “I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because – I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?”

— Tamsyn Muir

98. “The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House smiled, tiny and triumphant. Then she kneeled into Gideon’s arms. Gideon stumbled, sick with terror, kneeling them both down to the ground as Harrow lay like a broken rag doll. She forgot her sword, forgot everything as she cradled her used-up adept. She forgot the wrecked ligaments in her sword arm, her messed-up knee, the cups of blood she’d lost, everything but that tiny, smoldering, victorious smile.”

— Tamsyn Muir

99. “If you’re hiding a ship in your dungarees, please share it with the rest of the class.”

— Tamsyn Muir

100. “If you want to wallow in your shockingly vast reserves of self-pity, cut your throat and save me the food bill.”

— Tamsyn Muir