Top 250 Tamsyn Muir Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Crown was really very nearly pretty enough for Camilla.”

— Tamsyn Muir

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

205. “Even in the long dark days she spent wholly alone – in the libraries, or in her laboratory, fingers burnt from handling fatty ashes – she would hear voices just out of her hearing, or see things in her periphery that were not there. It seemed to her that sometimes her hands would grasp her own throat and press up against her windpipe until she saw spots in her vision. She would see dangling ropes; she would forget where she was and wipe out a whole morning’s scholarship with false memory.”

— Tamsyn Muir

206. “Once Gideon had stopped laughing, leaning against the icy pillar and beating on it with her fist, she had to breathe long and hard in order to not crack up again.”

— Tamsyn Muir

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “You don’t have to read these. Put your thumb over them if you like.”

— Tamsyn Muir

212. “They all agreed that whatever made Nona happy at school made Nona happy at school, but the bottom line remained that she shouldn’t buy anybody drugs.”

— Tamsyn Muir

213. “Once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.”

— Tamsyn Muir

214. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

217. “If you don’t, it’s fine, nobody cares, it’s a random name in a novel about bonermancy.”

— Tamsyn Muir

218. “I was avereragely good all my life. At least not criminally bad.”

— Tamsyn Muir

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

222. “Blessed Sister Lachrimorta and Blessed Sister Aisamorta were unaltered. They were still tiny, their faces still tight, grey-painted dribbles, and as the Ninth was free from miracles, they were still blind.”

— Tamsyn Muir

223. “A blood ward is for those without imagination.”

— Tamsyn Muir

224. “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

225. “The congregation muttered, mostly reproachful, and Gideon started to perk up. It wasn’t quite the worst day of her life now. This was some A-grade entertainment.”

— Tamsyn Muir

226. “The most she could hope for was Swords, Swords II, and maybe Swords III. “We ask,” began Teacher, “that you never open a locked door unless you have permission.”

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

228. “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

229. “Whenever you’re ready,” I said. “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll keep the home fires burning.”

— Tamsyn Muir

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

235. “I understood Princess Coronabeth Tridentarius better than she knew – just not entirely. I think it is hell to entirely understand any other person.”

— Tamsyn Muir

236. “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

237. “Everything in that room was beautiful, and all had gone to seed. It wasn’t like back in the Ninth where unbeautiful things were now old and ruined to boot – the Ninth must have always been a corpse, and corpses putrefied. The House of the First had been abandoned, and breathlessly waited to be used by someone other than time.”

— Tamsyn Muir

238. “Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.”

— Tamsyn Muir

239. “The worst part about trying to make good a sin is that it does not make the sin any less ugly.”

— Tamsyn Muir

240. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

242. “Being unexpectedly loved is so wonderful or terrible, isn’t it?”

— Tamsyn Muir

243. “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

244. “Cam told her that her main job was to be a Distraction. Nona asked if Harrowhark Nonagesimus had been a Distraction in life, and Cam said it was always the quiet ones.”

— Tamsyn Muir

245. “It’s a horrible thing to fall out of sight.”

— Tamsyn Muir

246. “Today isn’t the day when we start to use one another’s bodies. Or tomorrow, or ever. We’re not barbarians.”

— Tamsyn Muir

247. “IN THE DREAM, he told her the words about where he took his degrees, his postdoc, his research fellowship.”

— Tamsyn Muir

248. “What does love feel like?” said Cobweb. “Like you want to be ill, but can’t be, but know you might well be quite soon, so you can’t get comfortable at all,” said Floralinda. “Then I don’t think you love me one bit; that sounds like a classic case of indigestion,” said Cobweb.”

— Tamsyn Muir

249. “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

250. “Gideon slid her glasses back onto her face, obscuring feelings with tint.”

— Tamsyn Muir