Top 200 Tamsyn Muir Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “A blood ward is for those without imagination.”

— Tamsyn Muir

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

207. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

213. “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

214. “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

215. “I’m not anybody’s son or daughter,′ said Gideon firmly.”

— Tamsyn Muir

216. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

218. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

221. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

225. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

229. “The violet of her eyes was dried-up flowers; her mouth was the colour and softness of rocks.”

— Tamsyn Muir

230. “When it kicks off, nobody will be yelling anything.”

— Tamsyn Muir

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

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

— Tamsyn Muir

238. “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

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

— Tamsyn Muir

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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