Top 100 Deborah Harkness Quotes
#2. The king just sits there, moving one square at a time. The queen can move so freely. I suppose I'd rather lose the game than forfeit her freedom.
Deborah Harkness
#3. The plain truth is that the period I study is the 16th century, and they were absolutely obsessed with witches and spiritual beings.
Deborah Harkness
#4. For us to be together, we needed to decide which secrets to share and then let the others go.
Deborah Harkness
#5. She could not imagine why these companies all chose shades of blue for their logos. Blue had always struck her as such a serene, soothing color, yet all social media offered was endless agitation and posturing. It was worse than the court of Versailles. Come
Deborah Harkness
#6. All that children need is love, a grown-up to take responsibility for them, and a soft place to land.
Deborah Harkness
#7. I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.
Deborah Harkness
#8. I'm a professional non-fiction reader, that's what I do. But in my 20s we had our own vampire and witch moment, courtesy of Anne Rice, whose books I read and loved.
Deborah Harkness
#9. I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.
Deborah Harkness
#10. I don't expect you to have no regrets about who you've lost along the way. How could you not have been loved before, when I love you so much?
Deborah Harkness
#11. Why do today's women think it's important to open a door themselves?" he said sharply. "Do you believe it's a testament to your physical power?
Deborah Harkness
#12. All you have to do is be a good listener. Nobody really wants to keep secrets, not even the dead. People leave clues everywhere, and if you pay attention, you can piece them together.
Deborah Harkness
#13. My niece was very much caught up in the vampire craze for young adults, and she thought having a vampire boyfriend would be a cool thing. What do you do on a first date? The more I thought about it, the more fun I had imagining what you'd serve a vampire for dinner.
Deborah Harkness
#14. I would rather have had this moment with you - just this one night - than centuries with someone else ...
Deborah Harkness
#15. Could I have some water?" "I'll get it." Marcus hopped up from his stool. "There's some in the specimen fridge.
Deborah Harkness
#17. Witches see the truth plainly - even if their husbands are full of nonsense.
Deborah Harkness
#18. You persist in this romantic vision of what it is to be a vampire, but despite my best efforts to curb it I have a taste for blood.
Deborah Harkness
#19. As far as I can tell, there are only two emotions that keep the world spinning, year after year." He hesitated, then continued. "One is fear. The other is desire. That's what I wrote about." Love
Deborah Harkness
#20. In every moment, for the rest of my life, I will be choosing you.
Deborah Harkness
#21. I sighed. "What can I do to convince you that I'm all right?" "Pick up the phone more often, for starters," she said grimly.
Deborah Harkness
#22. Mark me well, Diana: Lives will be lost because of your love for my son ... What does it matter who deals the deathblow? If you do not do it, then Matthew will.
Deborah Harkness
#23. For storms will rage and oceans roar,
When Gabriel stands on sea and shore,
And as he blows his wondrous horn,
Old worlds die and new be born.
Deborah Harkness
#24. There's nothing more powerful than human fear - not magic, not vampire strength. Nothing.
Deborah Harkness
#25. The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.
Deborah Harkness
#26. I am capable of opening my own door," I said, getting out of the car. "Why do today's women think it's important to open a door themselves?" he said sharply.
Deborah Harkness
#27. Matthew had been accumulating secrets ... My life might be too brief to hear them all, never mind understand them.
Deborah Harkness
#28. Children needed love, a reliable source of comfort, and an adult willing to take responsibility for them.
Deborah Harkness
#29. It's one thing to wander in the darkness because you know no different, but it's quite another to enjoy the light only to have it taken from you,
Deborah Harkness
#30. Be careful, daughter ... You are a creature of the crossroads, neither here nor there. 'Tis a dangerous place to be.
Deborah Harkness
#32. Do not refuse me because I am dark and shadowed,' I whispered, remembering
Deborah Harkness
#34. So that's it?" I asked when I could manage it. "We're going to abide by an ancient, narrow-minded agreement made almost a thousand years ago. Case closed.
Deborah Harkness
#35. Now I have you. One day you will be gone, and my life will be over.
Deborah Harkness
#36. fine initium novum,'" Matthew said, gazing upon the land of his father as though he had, at last, come home. "'In every ending there is a new beginning.
Deborah Harkness
#37. Yes, I see that you are behaving like a prince but that doesn't mean you won't behave like a devil at the first opportunity.
Deborah Harkness
#39. Giving a woman your whole life is meaningless without giving her your whole heart as well.
Deborah Harkness
#40. His full name is Matthew Gabriel Philippe Bertrand Sebastien de Clermont. He was also a very good Sebastien, and a passable Gabriel. He hates Bertrand and will not answer to Philippe.
Deborah Harkness
#41. Goddess does not want us to imitate some ideal of perfection, but to be our true selves.
Deborah Harkness
#42. If you truly love someone, you will cherish what they despise most about themselves.
Deborah Harkness
#43. You know that I'm not going to let the Holy Roman Emperor - or anybody else, for that matter - seduce me.
Deborah Harkness
#44. You're taking this very well, Gallowglass," Diana said gratefully. "Matthew would be trying to talk me out of it." "That's what you get for falling in love with the wrong man," he said under his breath, slipping the phone back into his pocket.
Deborah Harkness
#45. Sir. My lord. Master Roydon." The young man blurted out most available titles except for "Your Majesty" and "Prince of Darkness." These were implied nonetheless.
Deborah Harkness
#46. They'll figure it out if we're not careful. Humans like power - secrets, too.
Deborah Harkness
#47. A wave of undergraduates arrived to disrupt the city's tranquillity.
Deborah Harkness
#48. You're impossible. Stop worrying about what other women do. Be your own extraordinary self.
Deborah Harkness
#49. Blue had always struck her as such a serene, soothing color, yet all social media offered was endless agitation and posturing. It was worse than the court of Versailles.
Deborah Harkness
#50. Here's Fernando, Sarah said in a tone suggesting that deliverance had come at last.
Deborah Harkness
#51. It pained Emily to her librarian's soul to see books mistreated like this.
Deborah Harkness
#54. Give me knowledge of my end and the measure of my days, so I may know my fraility. My lifetime is no longer than the width of my hand. It is only a moment, compared to yours.
Deborah Harkness
#55. I cannot shield you from the challenges you will face. You will know great loss and danger, but also great joy. You may doubt your instincts in the years to come, but your feet have been walking this path since the moment you were born.
Deborah Harkness
#56. I realised that today we are very much interested in reading about subjects that would have also interested people in the 1500s: ghosts, demons and things that go bump in the night.
Deborah Harkness
#57. We kissed each other, long and deep, while my legs opened like the covers of a book.
Deborah Harkness
#58. Within days they'd formed an unholy alliance with a foppish young French vampire in the Garden District who had implausibly golden hair and a streak of ruthlessness as wide as the Mississippi
Deborah Harkness
#59. I watched in silence as the parts of Matthew I knew and loved - the poet and the scientist, the warrior and the spy, the Renaissance prince and the father - fell away until only the darkest, most forbidding part of him remained. He was only the assassin now. But he was still the man I loved.
Deborah Harkness
#60. He walks through your future, but he's in the past as well. He's always in shadows, never in the light. And though he's dangerous, the shadowed man doesn't pose a threat to you.
Deborah Harkness
#61. I had been in 1590 for less than twenty-four hours, but I was already heartily sick of Christopher Marlowe.
Deborah Harkness
#62. She was like a camera that had been chronically out of focus until someone came by and twisted the lenses into alignment.
Deborah Harkness
#63. The first requirement of war: allies must not kill each other.
Deborah Harkness
#64. I want what I shouldn't want, and I crave someone I can never have.
Deborah Harkness
#66. The secret is that I may be the head of the Bishop-Clairmont family, but you are its heart," he whispered. "And the three of us are in perfect agreement: The heart is more important.
Deborah Harkness
#67. The strongest distinguishing characteristic of humans is their power of denial.
Deborah Harkness
#68. Einstein said that all physicists were aware that the distinctions between past, present, and future were only what he called 'a stubbornly persistent illusion.' Not only did he believe in marvels and wonders, he also believed in the elasticity of time.
Deborah Harkness
#71. I trust my wife's judgement ... That's what Philippe says about Granny, just before all hell breaks loose.
Deborah Harkness
#73. Be still," he said, voice harsh. "I might not be able to control myself if you step away.
Deborah Harkness
#74. This is why you have to stop keeping secrets, Matt. They're going to destroy you from the inside.
Deborah Harkness
#75. Cheap wine is defined by its price, and it depends on personal spending limits. So for me, any wine under $10 is cheap.
Deborah Harkness
#76. Because you will love him as you love no one else, I tied your magic to your feelings for him. Even so, only you will have the ability to draw it into the open.
Deborah Harkness
#77. I wanted to know how humans came up with a view of the world that had so little magic in it. I needed to understand how they convinced themselves that magic wasn't important.
Deborah Harkness
#78. Am I dreaming?" "You're not dreaming," Matthew said. "And, Diana?" He hesitated. "I love you." It was what I most wanted to hear. The forgotten chain inside me started to sing, quietly, in the dark.
Deborah Harkness
#79. As fast as I can tell there are only two emotions that keep the world spinning year after year ... One is fear. The other is desire.
Deborah Harkness
#81. Like all parents, they were just doing their best from moment to moment.
Deborah Harkness
#82. No wonder Philippe always looked so exhausted," he said ruefully when he was through. "It's very fatiguing pretending you're in charge when your wife actually rules the roost.
Deborah Harkness
#83. Like a siren who sings to the sailor, asking him to steer his ship into the rocks, the call of your blood could be my undoing - and yours.
Deborah Harkness
#84. That will save me from me breaking the window or picking her lock, he thought.
Deborah Harkness
#85. Daemons are brilliant, but we're not vicious - not like the vampires.
Deborah Harkness
#87. To pleasant songs my work was once given, and bright were all my labors then; / But now in tears to sad refrains I must return.
Deborah Harkness
#88. Films are wonderful but they do fix an identity. I can't read 'Pride and Prejudice' anymore, for instance, without imaging Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.
Deborah Harkness
#89. The question of why you're here-how we're all here- really does consume you," I said slowly ...
Matthew studied his wine. "It's the only question worth asking.
Deborah Harkness
#90. Gallowglass returned to Sporrengasse with two vampires and a pretzel.
Deborah Harkness
#91. I see you, even when you hide from the rest of the world. I hear you, even when you're silent.
Deborah Harkness
#92. You have found a woman who is worthy of you, with courage and hope to spare, Matthaios.' 'I know,' Matthew said, taking my hand. 'Know this, too: you are equally worthy of her. Stop regretting your life. Start living it.
Deborah Harkness
#93. It smells like the past. But not the dead past. It's so alive.
Deborah Harkness
#94. My ideas about vampires may be romantic, but your attitudes toward women need a major overhaul.
Deborah Harkness
#95. Men don't have it. Our resolve is born out of fear. It's merely bravado." His glance
Deborah Harkness
#96. And then you weave a forspell that called forth a rowan tree simply to tame a firedrake. Had
Deborah Harkness
#97. The wolf who wins is the wolf you feed. The evil wolf feeds on anger, guilt, sorrow, lies, and regret. The good wolf needs a diet of love and honesty, spiced up with big spoonfuls of compassion and faith. So if you want the good wolf to win, you're going to have to starve the other one.
Deborah Harkness
#98. It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.
Deborah Harkness
#99. My wife had learned to give in to what someone older, stronger, and meaner wanted.
Deborah Harkness
#100. If the thirsty stag runs to the brook, it's only because he isn't aware of the cruel bow ... If the unicorn runs to its chaste nest, it's only because he doesn't see the noose prepared for him.
Deborah Harkness
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
