Top 62 Sonya Hartnett Quotes
#1. I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind's history must be scored bloody with heartbreak. This hankering for affection is a blight upon us.
Sonya Hartnett
#2. Bad people aren't happy ... Wickedness often wears fancy clothes, dines on rich food, has money, controls armies, rules nations ... but it never seems to know joy. Peace, laughter, trust, ease: these things flee from wickedness like sparrows from the shadow of a hawk.
Sonya Hartnett
#3. Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.
Sonya Hartnett
#4. I feel it in my bones that if I had a kid, I would not either continue to write or have written the book I have done. So it's just me and the dog. I've always gotten along better with animals than I have with children, anyway.
Sonya Hartnett
#5. No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.
Sonya Hartnett
#6. A small town is nothing but eyes and gaping maw; it pecks at its own like a flock of vicious birds.
Sonya Hartnett
#7. Evangeline's obliviousness was a reason to like her rather than not: I liked least those schoolfellows whose awareness of me invariably caused misery.
Sonya Hartnett
#8. You're not supposed to have iron bars around you - no one is supposed to have that. You're supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That's what happens when you're alive.
Sonya Hartnett
#9. Goodbye, fin,' I say. And I wish I was going with him, to some warm sheltered hideaway in the hills, wish that I, too, could lie down beside the dog, feel his unbroken heartbeat, smell the dust in his fur.
There's only hours. I steel my courage.
Surrender.
Sonya Hartnett
#10. Just a few more minutes here, I suggest: life hates to leave, worried what it might miss. But Vernon, closer, is shaking his head. This is all.
Sonya Hartnett
#11. I mostly wrote 'Thursday's Child' to explore the idea of a wild child - a creature who lived much as humans used to live, when our needs were simple and our worlds were small.
Sonya Hartnett
#12. My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.
Sonya Hartnett
#13. We both knew that what I said was the truth, as well as being a lie. The pure and honest answer was pinging between us, hovering above the weeds.
Sonya Hartnett
#15. Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.
Sonya Hartnett
#16. If I'm desperate, I'll read anything. But even when I can be choosy, I still have no hard-and-fast rules. I have rules about what I won't read, rather than what I will. No science fiction, no romance, no chick lit. Although even these rules can be broken.
Sonya Hartnett
#17. You're just a coward, like all those who stand behind the suffering of others.
Sonya Hartnett
#18. I am Gabriel, the messenger, the teller of astonishing truths.
Sonya Hartnett
#19. I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.
Sonya Hartnett
#20. Yeah, reflections! The same, but different. Like twins - like blood brothers! And when you need something bad done, like punishment or revenge, you'll just ask me, and I will do it -
Sonya Hartnett
#21. Let me fly, let me see things that are hidden from other eyes.
Sonya Hartnett
#22. I spent three years at RMIT doing a bachelor of arts and media studies. It was a hugely formative experience. As someone who had a private Catholic school upbringing, the world suddenly became a much bigger and better place for me.
Sonya Hartnett
#23. She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.
Sonya Hartnett
#24. Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.
Sonya Hartnett
#25. It is not asking much
one person
out of all the world.
Sonya Hartnett
#26. She despised the sadness that hung inside her like old lace.
Sonya Hartnett
#28. There's fire in my fingers. I burn everything I touch.
Sonya Hartnett
#30. I think there is something in my books that says these are people doing their best under difficult circumstances - sometimes they do wrong things and make mistakes, but who doesn't? And who wants to read about somebody who never does?
Sonya Hartnett
#31. Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.
Sonya Hartnett
#32. I do not really write for children: I write only for me and for the few people I hope to please, and I write for the story.
Sonya Hartnett
#33. She is not a musical girl nor, intrinsically, a joyful girl; but the music of the four Swedes shook something awake inside her, and when she heard it she felt airborne and strong.
Sonya Hartnett
#34. How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?
Sonya Hartnett
#35. But what she feels is sometimes hard to express ... Much of what is best in her is warped on the voyage from within to without.
Sonya Hartnett
#37. How stupid it is that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else.
Sonya Hartnett
#38. I have thought you could not give everything to your books and also to your children, so for a long time, I thought if I had a child or a family, I'd think, 'How would I support them?' because basically I would stop writing.
Sonya Hartnett
#39. I'll always struggle over saying I'm a writer, even if I won the Booker Prize.
Sonya Hartnett
#40. It's stupid to be that way, so easily hurt; it's better to be like a plank of wood, an emotional mule. It's best not to feel, ... best to have your nerve endings cauterized.
Sonya Hartnett
#41. How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss forever?"
"You can't," Feather answered. "You feel the loss forever. But you put it in a corner of yourself, and bit by bit some of your sorrow changes into joy. And that's how you go on living.
Sonya Hartnett
#42. Andrej thought about it - the notion that the
world was riddled with holes where certain people and animals were meant to be, but weren't.
Sonya Hartnett
#43. Life is lived on the inside. What's outside doesn't matter.
Sonya Hartnett
#44. The quest for power is strange in that, once the quest has begun, the destination always seems to shift ever further away. What power one has is never enough; whatever happiness one had turns to bitterness.
Sonya Hartnett
#46. I don't understand why one should be one thing or the other. Writing, to me, is writing is writing. It should be a flexible tool. Whatever skills I have, have to work for me; I won't be dictated by them.
Sonya Hartnett
#47. There is nothing that is more beautiful than everything else in the world.
Sonya Hartnett
#48. Watching, she had felt unusually and keenly alive, alive the way a knife is sharp, so that the humiliation she was enduring was perfect, like the paring of skin from a hard apple.
Sonya Hartnett
#49. I love you, she told him, and he knew that this was true, and she knew that he believed her; but when she said it she saw the chain around his ankle, a length of links that let him wander, but not far. She did not see the chain around her own ankle, because love is blind.
Sonya Hartnett
#50. You always underestimated me. You thought you made me harmless when you gave angelhood to me. You forgot that some angels are warriors. Where there's warriors, there's war. I will fight to the death. It's my duty. I am not afraid.
Sonya Hartnett
#51. Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him.
Sonya Hartnett
#52. More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.
Sonya Hartnett
#53. She was the one who wanted to be with him, the one who watched and waited for him, who felt his absence badly.
Sonya Hartnett
#54. I fail to see how turning the subject over like compost can do anything except raise its stink.
Sonya Hartnett
#55. I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.
Sonya Hartnett
#57. I have spent a great deal of my time defending my work against those who see it as too complicated, too old in approach, too bleak to qualify as children's literature. This has been the bane of my life.
Sonya Hartnett
#58. I want my life to be mystifying, she declared, although she didn't know what she meant.
Sonya Hartnett
#59. Some things about him are the same as ever. He still looks painfully angelic.
Sonya Hartnett
#60. It is scary, sometimes, Tomas admitted. But the scary bits are what make you brave.
Sonya Hartnett
#61. In the quest for power, truth is always the first thing left behind.
Sonya Hartnett
#62. Strange how love coexists with hate, how they render eachother mute, how the swilling of them together makes a new and softer, sympathetic thing.
Sonya Hartnett
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