Top 100 Rachel Hartman Quotes
#1. The truth may not be told. Here is an acceptable lie.
Rachel Hartman
#2. Music is only work when someone else makes you do it.
Rachel Hartman
#3. The future would come, full of war and uncertainty, but I would not be facing it alone. I had love and work, friends and a people. I had a place to stand.
Rachel Hartman
#4. The Ninysh might have resisted a bit harder. I don't mean to imply that they were cowards ... , Maurizio said shrugging, clearly implying that the Ninysh were cowards.
Rachel Hartman
#6. How dare the world be beautiful when I was so horrifying?
Rachel Hartman
#8. Love is not a disease ... I cannot let them cut you out of me, nor her either. I will cling to my sickness, if it is a sickness. I will hold it close to me like the sun.
Rachel Hartman
#9. I didn't want this dance to end, or Kiggs to let go of my hand. I didn't want him to turn his eyes away, or live any other moment than this one.
Rachel Hartman
#11. Fond and protective equals love? I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.
Rachel Hartman
#12. I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing "just" about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.
Rachel Hartman
#13. The twin gods, Necessity and Chance, walked among the stars. What needed to be, was; what might be, sometimes was.
Rachel Hartman
#14. Rest of the court, to watch the Golden Plays?" "I can't. Tomorrow is dress rehearsal for the Treaty Eve concert.
Rachel Hartman
#15. Are you in love with Prince Lucian?' screamed my uncle. 'What were you up to when I arrived? You weren't going to mate right here in the snow, were you?
Rachel Hartman
#16. Sometimes the truth has difficulty breaching the city walls of our beliefs. A lie, dressed in the correct livery, passes through more easily.
Rachel Hartman
#17. I understood something about myself as well, even if I didn't have the will to examine it just then.
Rachel Hartman
#19. Enough mind chatter. I imagined every thought encapsulated in a bubble; I exhaled them into the world. Gradually the noise ceased, and my mind was dark and still.
Rachel Hartman
#20. Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.
Rachel Hartman
#21. There are people in this world who commit horrifying and unnatural acts beyond anything your naive imagination could conceive. He is your worst nightmare. Heed my warning and stay away from him. I
Rachel Hartman
#22. I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.
Rachel Hartman
#23. There are two sacred causes in this world," he said, holding up his pinkie and ring ringer. "Chance and necessity. By chance I was there to help when you had need.
Rachel Hartman
#24. More insomniacs!' cried the doctor. 'Come in, come in.
Rachel Hartman
#26. Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!
Rachel Hartman
#27. O saar, beware!
Beware the horde,
The ones you never see.
We build your lairth,
Repair, invent,
We do all this for free.
You torch our hideth
You crunch our boneth
Kill with impunity,
But we are not
Tho helpless now.
Our day cometh. We are free.
Rachel Hartman
#28. I'd had more than my share of beautiful today. Tomorrow I'd give some back, restore and replenish the world.
Rachel Hartman
#29. I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don't need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.
Rachel Hartman
#30. Was good to see a dragon's teeth. A dragon with his mouth closed was far more likely to be working up a flame. That seemed completely obvious.
Rachel Hartman
#32. Of love. Yes, that was it: he thought I meant to proposition
Rachel Hartman
#33. The thing about reason is that there's a geometry to it. It travels in a straight line, so that slightly different beginnings can lead you to wildly divergent endpoints.
Rachel Hartman
#34. I experienced every wing beat as a terrifying drop followed by a stomach-lurching heave. I was sick over a glacier. Brisi watched with interest and screeched, A thousand years from now, that will still be there, frozen in the ice. Unless a quig eats it.
Rachel Hartman
#35. The borderlands of madness used to have much sterner signage around them than they do now.
Rachel Hartman
#36. I took a break, stretched, tried again, failed, kicked over the music stand (I am not proud of that), and wonder whether I had reached the limits of my musical ability. Maybe I'd never had any. Surely someone with a modicum of talent wouldn't have to work this hard.
Rachel Hartman
#37. I felt lighter when I had finished, and for once emptiness was a sweet relief and a condition to be treasured.
Rachel Hartman
#38. Orma had given me a timepiece that emitted blasphemy-inducing chirps at whatever early hour I specified.
Rachel Hartman
#39. Keeping my smile raised like a shield between us, I curtsied and quit the room.
Rachel Hartman
#40. He's got the place to himself. Once the other invalids learned there was a dragon coming, they miraculously got well! The lame could walk and the blind decided they didn't really need to see. He's a panacea.
Rachel Hartman
#41. Who will kiss you? Who will rock you to sleep?" His voice was slow, drowsy.
"You never did," I said, trying to tease him. "You were more father to me than my father, but you never did that."
"Someone should. Someone should love you. I will bite him if he will not.
Rachel Hartman
#42. He looked at me again and his eyes shone in the lamplight, or with the inner light of delighted anticipation.
His enthusiasm made him beautiful.
Rachel Hartman
#43. The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods.
Rachel Hartman
#44. Walk with an open heart, and you will hear the call. You will see your task shining before you, like a star.
Rachel Hartman
#45. I do what I have always done. I reach across and bring the worlds together.
Rachel Hartman
#46. Haven't you always been more than yourself? Haven't we all? We are none of us just one thing.
Rachel Hartman
#47. A feeling rose in me, and I just let it, because what harm could it do? It only had another thirty-two adagio bars of life in this world. Twenty-four. Sixteen. Eight more bars in which I love you. Three. Two. One.
Rachel Hartman
#48. I don't mean to imply that they were cowards ... , Maurizio said, shrugging, clearly implying that [they] were cowards.
Rachel Hartman
#49. He was exactly my height, which surprised me; my awe of him had made him seem taller.
Rachel Hartman
#50. There are melodies that speak as eloquently as words, that flow logically and inevitably from a single, pure emotion.
Rachel Hartman
#51. This is my mind's garden, I tend it; I order it. I have nothing to fear.
Rachel Hartman
#52. The world is seldom so simple that it hinges on us alone.
Rachel Hartman
#53. Sprinted past him up the stairs, toward the royal family's wing of the palace.
Rachel Hartman
#54. The beauty of the place moved me; I loved how the clean air felt in my lungs, how far I was from everything I had ever known. People I'd hurt, people I'd failed, people who thought me a monster. Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.
Rachel Hartman
#55. There was a great brightness and, um ... Imagine what it would look like if you could see music, or thought.
Rachel Hartman
#56. Claude rubs the back of his neck and wrinkles his nose, about to tell me he was never sad. I believe this is called bravado and is not limited to lawyers, or even men, although that combination makes it almost unavoidable.
Rachel Hartman
#57. I'm awestruck that you had warm cabbages sitting around.
Rachel Hartman
#58. You bluffed him? A Porphyrian double ton of fire and brimstone, fangs like swords, claws like ... like swords! And you just ... bluffed him?
Rachel Hartman
#59. He smiled sadly, then placed his hand around mine so we were holding the book together. "I believe that - with everything I have," he said, holding my gaze. He kissed the edge of the book because he could not kiss me.
Rachel Hartman
#60. But do not make the mistake, Seraphina, of supposing that suffering ennobles anyone.
Rachel Hartman
#61. And I realized a wondrous truth: that knowledge could be our treasure, that there were things humankind knew that we did not, that our conquest need not comprise taking and killing, but could consist of our mutual conquest of ignorance and distrust.
Rachel Hartman
#62. If I could keep a single moment for all time, that would be the one. I became the very air; I was full of stars.
Rachel Hartman
#63. I will see you both in Goredd, then, when I clasp your hands across the smoking ashes of my enemies."
"Isn't that what you were trying to avoid by sneaking up the Omiga?" Kiggs said.
The Comonot considered. "Yes, but I like the sound of those words. Interesting.
Rachel Hartman
#64. I heard you, sought you, and have found you. I have reached for you, across space and sense and the laws of nature. I do not know how.
Rachel Hartman
#66. Nothing was just one thing; there were worlds within worlds. Those of us who trod the line between were blessed and burdened with both.
Rachel Hartman
#67. He steadied himself with one great hand against the city wall. He had told me he'd never stop growing. He'd meant it literally. What had I been addressing all these years? His finger?
Rachel Hartman
#68. My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.
Rachel Hartman
#69. For future reference: do not underestimate the seductive power of math.
Rachel Hartman
#70. We shall have long meetings where Kiggs agonizes and Glisselda teases him. That's the pattern so far.
Rachel Hartman
#71. Why live in fear that he might find me disgusting someday, when I could make it happen right now?
Rachel Hartman
#72. You're not a villain, I said. Or else we were two villains in a pod.
Rachel Hartman
#73. We must show them we're superior and put them in their place. Dominate or be dominated.
Rachel Hartman
#74. On a good day, he was friend enough. On a bad day, running into his inadequacy was like tripping up the stairs. It hurt, but it felt like my own fault.
Rachel Hartman
#75. He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.
Rachel Hartman
#76. I cannot perch among those who think that I am broken.
Rachel Hartman
#77. Bend like a willow. You made it sound so simple."
"It was simple."
"Indeed. I bent and changed everything. This is going to have consequences.
Rachel Hartman
#78. I spent that many years thinking I was alone. Then you prance into my life, nearly giving me a paroxysm, and now you deign to tell me there are more.
Rachel Hartman
#79. However strenuously the world pulls us apart, however long the absence, we are not changed for being dashed upon the rocks. I knew you then, I know you now, I shall know you again when you come home.
Rachel Hartman
#80. I was drawn to his aloofness, the way cats gravitate toward people who'd rather avoid them.
Rachel Hartman
#81. Have you read Belondweg?"
"I coudn't call myself much of a scholar if I hadn't," he said.
He was adorable and he made me smile, but I couldn't let him see.
Rachel Hartman
#82. He chuckled into my hair, enjoying this. I loved him terribly just then, how he puzzled through obscure scholarship and reveled in ideas, never mind that he'd called my mind hell.
Rachel Hartman
#83. My companions ate the bear. I found I had no appetite.
Rachel Hartman
#84. Your very presence makes other people feel awkward. You stand out when in fact you'd rather not.
Rachel Hartman
#86. I think I've heard that ballad," I said. "It's beautiful but it ends sadly.
Rachel Hartman
#87. How did you merit so much devotion so quickly?' I asked, making no attempt to keep the sarcasm from my voice.
'I show them Heaven', said she, without a trace of irony. 'People are so desperate for light'.
Rachel Hartman
#88. Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that's like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.
Rachel Hartman
#89. Once I had feared that telling the truth would be like falling, that love would be like hitting the ground, but here I was, my feet firmly planted, standing on my own.
Rachel Hartman
#91. I had felt the shot coming; I hadn't realized the bow was loaded with this very quarrel, perfectly calibrated to hit him hardest. What part of me had been studying him, stockpiling knowledge as ammunition?
Rachel Hartman
#92. It is permissible to be the god of your own metaphors.
Rachel Hartman
#93. Some sober part of my brain seemed to observe everything I did, clucking disdainfully, informing me that ought to be embarrassed, yet making no move
Rachel Hartman
#94. He didn't wear his heart on his sleeve, exactly, but he did keep it in a place where I could see it.
Rachel Hartman
#95. Playing flute was the one thing I knew could make people see a human, not a monster.
Rachel Hartman
#96. Are we irretrievably broken?
Never beyond repair, good heart.
Rachel Hartman
#97. Sir James waved a gnarled hand. They're nothing but feral file clerks, dragons. They used to alphabetize the coins in their hoards.
Rachel Hartman
#98. Was it probably true that reasoning beings were equal? It seemed more like a belief than a fact, even if I agreed with it. If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitably end up at point of illogic, an article of faith?
Rachel Hartman
#99. I was half lawyer; I always noticed the loopholes.
Rachel Hartman
#100. A single action could derive from many motivations. I should never assume.
Rachel Hartman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
