Top 200 Tamsyn Muir Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Today isn’t the day when we start to use one another’s bodies. Or tomorrow, or ever. We’re not barbarians.”

— Tamsyn Muir

202. “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

203. “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

204. “It is a drawing of the letter S” said the deep, solemn voice from over her shoulder, and she realized she had stopped midstride. “The letter in question is constructed from six short marks stacked vertically three by three. There are two triangles on the top and bottom. which, along with some diagonal strokes, form a calligraphic S.”

— Tamsyn Muir

205. “Crown was really very nearly pretty enough for Camilla.”

— Tamsyn Muir

206. “Hail to the Lady of the Ninth House,” warbled a voice delightedly, bringing the count of people who had ever been happy to see Harrow up to three.”

— Tamsyn Muir

207. “If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought.”

— Tamsyn Muir

208. “The message has two parts left, and you are looking at one of those parts. The name for this part of the message was ‘Aim’ when the message was passed to us through my forebear Emma Sen.”

— Tamsyn Muir

209. “The Master Warden found the idea of dying inconvenient.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

211. “They only intervened if it looked like you might choke to death on your own vomit, a mercy that you always vaguely thought a shame.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

213. “The skeletons aren’t reanimations, Ninth, they’re revenants: ghosts inhabiting a physical shell.”

— Tamsyn Muir

214. “They held out a lavender silk handkerchief.”

— Tamsyn Muir

215. “A tableau of magicians and their guardians revolved around the corpses.”

— Tamsyn Muir

216. “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

217. “We’re all in this together,’ she said, which was a typically Fifth assumption. 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

218. “So what is the training, then – how to attain Lyctorhood?” The little priest looked at them again. “Well, I don’t know,” he said.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

220. “Her going full atria was perfectly over-the-top. The crew on your horrible flagships are always trying to martyr themselves whenever you so much as ask for an orange juice.”

— Tamsyn Muir

221. “Which just goes to show that only getting to NCEA Level 2 isn’t going to stop you making waves in life, right. You can still eat steak, talk to wizards, and take down the government.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

224. “You cut up an onion, burn it at the bottom of the pot, put in a few vegetables, and then some meat. It won’t taste like anything, so put in a few teaspoons of salt, and then it’ll taste like a few teaspoons of salt.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

226. “She had long since ascended to the rank of double douchebag.”

— Tamsyn Muir

227. “Honesty, this is a matter of life.” The chain rattled and the door hesitated. “You’re s’posed to say ‘and death,’” he supplied. “I have started to not believe in the other one,” said Nona. “It’s stupid saying ‘and death’ when most of the people who die get up and walk around again. Maybe if I said ’a matter of life and double death.”

— Tamsyn Muir

228. “Please help me give them those reasons. We are done here. Let us all go to the bathroom. Dismissed, Ctesiphon-3, Troia cell.”

— Tamsyn Muir

229. “The blood all drained away from Gideon’s cheeks for some reason. The world spun off its axis. Bright spots sparked in her vision. She found herself saying, intelligently, “Mmf.”

— Tamsyn Muir

230. “She stood next to a skeleton whose arms were so full with bits of bone and lengths of tibia that it trailed chips like breadcrumbs. It was easy enough to stand beside it politely until the door opened, then to trip it up, then to step over it. She unsheathed her rapier with a silver whisper, slipping the knuckles of her left hand through the obsidian bands.”

— Tamsyn Muir

231. “It knocked Cytherea clean through the wall. The wall was already feeling pretty sorry for itself, and at this last insult it gave up entirely and collapsed, with a terrific rumble and crash of rock and brick and bursting glass slumping outward onto the garden terrace.”

— Tamsyn Muir

232. “You are banned from squatting in my lobes and my hippocampus. I don’t want you pushing all the furniture around in there.”

— Tamsyn Muir

233. “In her comic books, necromancers kissed the gloved palms of their front-liner comrades in blessed thanks for all that they did. In the comic books none of these adepts had heart disease, and a lot of them had necromantically uncharacteristic cleavage.”

— Tamsyn Muir

234. “As though the universe could withstand more holes; as though the fabric of the universe had not become a series of lacework cut-outs linked by the thin, snappable joins of those who remained. Could the pattern sustain itself, with such absences? Could she, who had once thought herself well-versed in absence, endure alone? The answer was so obviously no; she was not even ready to have the question put to her.”

— Tamsyn Muir

235. “Colum blinked. His necromancer did not. “I had heard that you were speaking now,” he said. “It seems a pity.”

— Tamsyn Muir

236. “They’d bring me home in cuffs, but I’d come back laughing my ass off.”

— Tamsyn Muir

237. “Her necromancer said gruffly: “Fine. But we’ll watch over the Seventh House. I’m not going down the ladder with your invalid cavalier.”

— Tamsyn Muir

238. “From then on she slept wearing her rapier, her gauntlet on her chest like a heavy obsidian heart.”

— Tamsyn Muir

239. “Next cult, let’s go for teenage girls instead.”

— Tamsyn Muir

240. “Naberius hadn’t looked at her like she had personally taken a whiz on his nicest jacket, she would have asked him about it.”

— Tamsyn Muir

241. “The House continued on in grand and grisly majesty because you were always looking at it; it continued because you watched it continue, changeless and black, before your eyes.”

— Tamsyn Muir

242. “She was the calmest she had ever been in her entire life. It was just her body that was frightened.”

— Tamsyn Muir

243. “Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.”

— Tamsyn Muir

244. “That meant Nona was being ordinarily selfish, not dangerously selfish.”

— Tamsyn Muir

245. “I want to go,” said Gideon. “This sounds impossibly vapid.” “I want to eat a dessert.”

— Tamsyn Muir

246. “Harrow arranging her breakfast was a concept so disagreeable there was no space left in her head for it.”

— Tamsyn Muir

247. “Harrow had been the only birth amidst a sea of tiny tombs.”

— Tamsyn Muir