Top 200 Tamsyn Muir Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “A head start,” said her necromancer, “is the only advantage one can claim by choice.”

— Tamsyn Muir

103. “A Tupperware container is only as good as it’s lid.”

— Tamsyn Muir

104. “Menudo alivio debieron de sentir tus padres cuando murieron – dijo Gideon en voz alta.”

— Tamsyn Muir

105. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

107. “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

108. “As Harrow smouldered with hatred, Gideon began to enjoy herself.”

— Tamsyn Muir

109. “We press down the hand of a clock, to try to stop it from ticking the last second.”

— Tamsyn Muir

110. “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

111. “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

112. “Harrow was forbidden entry in the same way she was forbidden from going up to the top tier of the drillshaft and taking a hammer to the oxygen-sealant machines. It would be the end.”

— Tamsyn Muir

113. “I must no longer accept,” she said slowly, “being a stranger to you.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

115. “But now this benighted vision stood before its natural predator, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House.”

— Tamsyn Muir

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “In a way, it helped. Nothing added to your resolution to live so much as someone else suggesting that you die.”

— Tamsyn Muir

121. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

123. “She more correctly climbed down into love, picked its locks, opened its gates, and breached its inner chamber.”

— Tamsyn Muir

124. “I think ‘bone frenzy’ might be a term open to coarse misinterpretation, personally.”

— Tamsyn Muir

125. “But what was Teacher the mould for? Griddle, at the first sign of trouble – ” “Run like hell,” said Gideon. “I was going to say, Hit it with your sword,” said Harrow.”

— Tamsyn Muir

126. “But maybe we shouldn’t,” she said, holding the eyelids to that little slit-watching the widening white crack, watching the river water pound it into the place where it wanted to be even if the River itself didn’t. “If we end here, it’ll be just like... a bad dream, won’t it? And maybe we’ll wake up somewhere else. I know we won’t,” she explained, “but we don’t have to know that... maybe if we all go, it’ll be quick.”

— Tamsyn Muir

127. “Cause by itself is an empty concept. The choice to get up in the morning – the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one – the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower – those choices cause all sorts if things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible.”

— Tamsyn Muir

128. “She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed-up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes.”

— Tamsyn Muir

129. “But I’d do it again,” said the war crime.”

— Tamsyn Muir

130. “Certainly not. Like everything else in this ridiculous conglomeration of cooling gas, it’s perfectly explicable, I just need to explic-it.”

— Tamsyn Muir

131. “I could never stop you from loving anything. I don’t have the right. Nobody has the right to tell you who to love or who not to love, and equally nobody’s obliged to love you. If you were forced into loving them, it wouldn’t be love...”

— Tamsyn Muir

132. “Come on, love. Guys as careful as me don’t have accidents.”

— Tamsyn Muir

133. “Nonagesimus,” she said slowly, “the only job I’d do for you would be if you wanted someone to hold the sword as you fell on it. The only job I’d do for you would be if you wanted your ass kicked so hard, the Locked Tomb opened and a parade came out to sing, ‘Lo! A destructed ass.’ The only job I’d do would be if you wanted me to spot you while you backflipped off the top tier into Drearburh.” “That’s three jobs,” said Harrowhark. “Die in a fire, Nonagesimus.”

— Tamsyn Muir

134. “The ashes in the incinerator had been raked out and combed over, and the confirmation that they were human remains was not illuminating. The surviving necromancers had gathered around a bowl of them, and they had all pounced on it like a bowl of peanuts at a party.”

— Tamsyn Muir

135. “You were an unfilled hole, but even a hole might be content in its emptiness.”

— Tamsyn Muir

136. “Harrow, if you bother to remember anything from my ramblings, please remember this: once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.”

— Tamsyn Muir

137. “The nuns tried their best, but a few minutes later it was confirmed that one of the hermits had died of shock, and everyone around him celebrated his sacred good fortune.”

— Tamsyn Muir

138. “Fear doesn’t help us achieve a state of grace; it deafens the heart.”

— Tamsyn Muir

139. “If anything it seemed to be gaining momentum, like a very boring avalanche.”

— Tamsyn Muir

140. “Gideon never ran unless she had to.”

— Tamsyn Muir

141. “You’re not waiting for her resurrection; you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”

— Tamsyn Muir

142. “Nona had kept giggling, and that got her told off because Harrowhark Nonagesimus didn’t giggle.”

— Tamsyn Muir

143. “Then she said, ‘When you don’t have it too badly – when you can live to maybe fifty years – when your body’s dying from the inside out, when your blood cells are eating you alive the whole time... it makes for such a necromancer, Gideon the Ninth. A walking thanergy generator. If they could figure out someway to stop you when you’re mostly cancer and just a little bit woman, they would!”

— Tamsyn Muir

144. “Hell spat you back out. Fair enough.”

— Tamsyn Muir

145. “Nona leant into her and said, “Thanks. I love you too, Camilla,” and: “Do you know who I am yet?”

— Tamsyn Muir

146. “He was narrow shouldered with long, long arms, and she was beginning to believe that he was not simply a douchebag who used lip balm, but a douchebag who used lip balm and had a very long reach.”

— Tamsyn Muir

147. “Don’t start the ‘I was toying with her, mwa ha ha’ noise, because I won’t believe it. Your plan backfired, Tridentarius. You’ve got the sickness. I know the signs of Nonagesimitis. You were all lined up for a big hot injection of vitamin H.”

— Tamsyn Muir

148. “The pause stumbled execrably, fell down the stairs, and lay in a tangle at the bottom in full view of all listeners, who had to watch it bleed out in embarrassment.”

— Tamsyn Muir

149. “This won’t work,” she said. “I’ve never had to work with something so small before.” “That’s what she said,” murmured Gideon, sotto voce.”

— Tamsyn Muir

150. “Stop that. I need you listening, not racking your brain for rare negatives.”

— Tamsyn Muir