Top 100 Deborah Harkness Quotes
#1. 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
#3. You have always been a child between, a witch apart. But there is no path forward that does not have him in it. Whichever way you go, you must choose him.
Deborah Harkness
#4. Witches have their share of nasty legends to contend with, I said, thinking of the witch-hunts and the executions that followed.
Deborah Harkness
#5. Your father says a wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountaintop.
Deborah Harkness
#6. 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
#7. Scientist. Vampire. Warrior. Spy. The bells paused before the final knell. Prince. I wondered what more our journey would reveal about this complex man I had married.
Deborah Harkness
#8. Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century book collector and alchemist whose books and papers had come to the Bodleian from the Ashmolean Museum in the nineteenth century, along with the number 782.
Deborah Harkness
#9. English vampires may not be as well behaved around witches as the American ones are.
Deborah Harkness
#10. Matthew feels deeply. It is a blessing as well as a burden to love to love so much that you can hurt badly when love is gone.
Deborah Harkness
#11. You do angry. I just saw it. And you left at least one hole in my carpet to prove it.
Deborah Harkness
#12. 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
#13. Now I have you. One day you will be gone, and my life will be over.
Deborah Harkness
#14. Giving a woman your whole life is meaningless without giving her your whole heart as well.
Deborah Harkness
#15. I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.
Deborah Harkness
#16. My experiences thus far had me planning to throttle the first Tudor historian I met upon my return for gross dereliction of duty.
Deborah Harkness
#18. You don't feel this way now, but you're lucky to have found her at last ... But is she lucky, Hamish? Is she fortunate to have a creature like me in pursuit? ... That's entirely up to you. Just remember-no secrets. Not if you love her.
Deborah Harkness
#19. Now most in the room accept we're more similar than different and treat one another with courtesy.
Deborah Harkness
#20. Do not refuse me because I am dark and shadowed,' I whispered, remembering
Deborah Harkness
#22. Be careful, daughter ... You are a creature of the crossroads, neither here nor there. 'Tis a dangerous place to be.
Deborah Harkness
#23. A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show - in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever - is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery.
Deborah Harkness
#24. 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
#25. Children needed love, a reliable source of comfort, and an adult willing to take responsibility for them.
Deborah Harkness
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#31. I'm a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.
Deborah Harkness
#32. Vote?" Matthew said, incredulous. "Since when did we vote in this family?" "Since Marcus took over the Knights of Lazarus," Gallowglass replied, drawing a silver lighter from his pocket. "We've been choking on democracy since the day you left.
Deborah Harkness
#33. It pained Emily to her librarian's soul to see books mistreated like this.
Deborah Harkness
#34. Here's Fernando, Sarah said in a tone suggesting that deliverance had come at last.
Deborah Harkness
#35. 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
#36. You're impossible. Stop worrying about what other women do. Be your own extraordinary self.
Deborah Harkness
#37. A wave of undergraduates arrived to disrupt the city's tranquillity.
Deborah Harkness
#38. They'll figure it out if we're not careful. Humans like power - secrets, too.
Deborah Harkness
#39. Matthew had been accumulating secrets ... My life might be too brief to hear them all, never mind understand them.
Deborah Harkness
#40. 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
#41. You know that I'm not going to let the Holy Roman Emperor - or anybody else, for that matter - seduce me.
Deborah Harkness
#42. If you truly love someone, you will cherish what they despise most about themselves.
Deborah Harkness
#43. Fear had also choked out any desire to work magic. It had been my crutch and my cloak, keeping me from exercising my power. Fear had sheltered me from the curiosity of others and provided an oubliette where I could forget who I really was: a witch. I'd
Deborah Harkness
#45. Goddess does not want us to imitate some ideal of perfection, but to be our true selves.
Deborah Harkness
#47. Our arrival there and not at a busier, more crowded airport on the other side of town was yet another example of the magical efficiency and convenience of vampire travel.
Deborah Harkness
#48. Memories were short and history unkind. It was the way of the world.
Deborah Harkness
#49. 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
#50. One should find wholeness in marriage, Gabriel, but it should not be a prison for either party, said Rabbi Loew.
Deborah Harkness
#51. For us to be together, we needed to decide which secrets to share and then let the others go.
Deborah Harkness
#52. We face a dark future if children stop asking questions, Susanna, Goody Alsop remarked.
Deborah Harkness
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Opportunity is fleeting, experiment dangerous, and judgement difficult.
Deborah Harkness
#58. 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
#59. All that children need is love, a grown-up to take responsibility for them, and a soft place to land.
Deborah Harkness
#60. Are you smelling me?" After yesterday I suspected that my body was giving him all kinds of information I didn't want him to have.
"Don't tempt me," he murmured.
Deborah Harkness
#62. 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
#63. Secrets are unreliable allies. they allow us to believe we are safr, yet all the while they are destroying us.
Deborah Harkness
#64. 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
#66. Everyone who has ever been in pain knows that morphine and magic are the same.
Deborah Harkness
#67. A man like Matthew never frees himself of the shadows completely. But perhaps it is necessary to embrace the darkness in order to love him, Philippe continued.
Deborah Harkness
#68. 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
#69. Se Souvenir du passe, et qu'il ya un avenir: Remember the past, and that there is a future.
Deborah Harkness
#70. 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
#71. are you always like this, all dressed up in adrenaline, and no place to go?
Deborah Harkness
#72. How we spoke about magic and with whom we discussed it. Humans outnumbered us and found our power frightening, my mother explained, and fear was the strongest force on earth.
Deborah Harkness
#73. I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.
Deborah Harkness
#74. In this room we understand why this war might be fought ... it's about our common belief that no one has the right to tell two creatures that they cannot love each other
no matter what their species.
Deborah Harkness
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.
Deborah Harkness
#79. There's nothing more powerful than human fear - not magic, not vampire strength. Nothing.
Deborah Harkness
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#84. Sometimes my pagan background was a serious professional liability.
Deborah Harkness
#85. Matthew did remember saying something like that once - long before he'd met Diana. He made an involuntary check on the house. It was a combination of instinct and reflex now, this need to
Deborah Harkness
#86. In every moment, for the rest of my life, I will be choosing you.
Deborah Harkness
#87. She's taken over one of the castle's towers and painted the walls with images of the philosopher's stone. It's like working inside a Ripley scroll! I've
Deborah Harkness
#90. 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
#91. Witches see the truth plainly - even if their husbands are full of nonsense.
Deborah Harkness
#93. For me, a $20 wine that drinks like a $40 wine in terms of complexity and interest is a value, while a $5 wine that is not very good is not a value at all in my opinion.
Deborah Harkness
#94. Could I have some water?" "I'll get it." Marcus hopped up from his stool. "There's some in the specimen fridge.
Deborah Harkness
#95. I would rather have had this moment with you - just this one night - than centuries with someone else ...
Deborah Harkness
#97. As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.
Deborah Harkness
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I was planning on starting a new file on my computer with the title Phrases That Sound One Way to Witches but Mean Something Else to Vampires.
Deborah Harkness
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