Top 250 Tamsyn Muir Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “You could have lived for her... but didn’t know how.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

103. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

107. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

109. “The lamps made lacklustre any real light. They explosively birthed malform shadow all around.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

111. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

113. “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

114. “Don’t worry, kiddie, she said tiredly. I’ll keep loving you – my problem is I don’t know how to stop.”

— Tamsyn Muir

115. “While we were developing common sense, she studied the blade.”

— Tamsyn Muir

116. “I am – so I won’t,” he said. “I swear. I mean, I could make a killing, so you’ve got me by the balls here.” “Please never say that again,” said the Angel.”

— Tamsyn Muir

117. “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

118. “I guess I might as well die,” he concluded, something he now suggested hopefully at least three times a day.”

— Tamsyn Muir

119. “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

120. “Evidence,” he said, “outweighs testimony.”

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

125. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

131. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

133. “I find the idea comforting... that thousands of years after you’re gone... is when you really live. That your echo is louder than your voice.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

136. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

139. “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

140. “Now we kick her ass until candy comes out,” said Gideon. “Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don’t cry, we can’t fight her if you’re crying.”

— Tamsyn Muir

141. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

148. “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

149. “If they want to make you into a bad wizard, be a bad wizard. We can write the history books to say you were a good wizard. Or at least an okay wizard.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir