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

102. “It felt so easy to be good when you were happy.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

105. “She did not know what made Ortus Ortus. He was a mystery too boring to solve.”

— Tamsyn Muir

106. “Don’t hypothetically shove stuff up my butt again,” said Gideon, “it never does any good.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

108. “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

109. “Gideon had to stare pretty hard at skimpy nighties to get over that one.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

111. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

117. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

120. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

123. “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

124. “Paul, practical, clasped one of her hands between them, and used the other to rub a rough section of black frieze over her sides to try to warm her up. “Okay. Don’t worry,” they said. Nona felt hot and cross. “I’ve just told you why I’m worried, in detail, and I think that matters quite a lot.”

— Tamsyn Muir

125. “You’re a smart girl, Harrowhark. You might turn some of that brain to the toughest lesson: that of grief.”

— Tamsyn Muir

126. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

128. “As for your instruction here, this is what the First House asks of you.” The room drew breath together – or at least, all the necromancers did, alongside a goodly proportion of their cavaliers. Harrow’s knuckles whitened. Gideon wished that she could flop into a seat or take a sly nap. Everybody was poised in readiness for the outlined syllabus, and scholarship made her want to die.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

131. “I’ve got a perfectly baseless assumption, and every scholar knows that this is where you begin.”

— Tamsyn Muir

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “The Ninth didn’t think anyone was in anything together, or if they were, they all had to disperse as soon as humanly possible to avoid splash damage.”

— Tamsyn Muir

137. “Gideon rolled her eyes so hard that she felt in danger of twisting the optic nerve.”

— Tamsyn Muir

138. “Your only settings were power-vomit and murder.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

140. “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

141. “Gideon was lolling behind Harrow, picking at her fingernails and staring at the pieces of paper, which had handwriting that was more like cryptography.”

— Tamsyn Muir

142. “Someone’s been having fun in here,” said Gideon. Harrow shot her a look but did not enforce the vow of silence. “Yes,” she said. “Me.”

— Tamsyn Muir

143. “I mean it, If Camilla wants someone dead,” he said, “then far be it from me to stand in her way. All I can do at that point is watch the bloodshed and look for a mop. One flesh, one end, and all that.”

— Tamsyn Muir

144. “They do not have to enjoy each other’s society; they must simply take their togetherness as assumed. The cavalier who will not sleep in the same room as their necromancer must question themselves as to why. Their love is the love that fears only for the other: the love of service on both sides.”

— Tamsyn Muir

145. “Harrowhark smiled. This smile was unusual too: it betokened conspiracy, which was normal, except that this one invited Gideon to be part of it. Her eyes glowed like coals with sheer collusion. Gideon didn’t know if she could handle all these new expressions on Harrow: she needed a lie down.”

— Tamsyn Muir

146. “I know how hard it is for you to kick against the goad,” said the new person. “But there are more worlds than this. Come with us. We are the love that is perfected by death – but even death will be no more, death can also die.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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