Quotes from Kathryn Harrison

The three of us spend much of our week together at art museums and botanic gardens and other tourist attractions. We are drawn to these places of silent staring and confused, enervated wandering because they make us seem and feel less like freaks as we stare in speechless shock at one another.

Prophecy, annunciation, virginity. A hidden sword, an angel bearing a crown of jewels. An army of knights, a cloud of butterflies, a phallic arrow that missed its mark. A tower cell, an evil bishop, a king's betrayal. A heart that would not burn, a dove that flew from the flames that failed to dispatch that immortal heart.

Nights, in my room, I turn the handle of my grandfather's old-fashioned razor to release the blade from under its stainless steel cover. I trace the sharp edge over my arm, press it into places where a scratch might go unnoticed. It's not so much a desire for punishment as for manageable pain, bleeding that can be stanched.

The 1643 Martyrologie des chevaliers (Martyrology of knights)

Guillaume Gruel, Richemont's personal chronicler, recorded the dialogue from his employer's perspective with an evident taste for the dashing. "Joan, it has been said that you wish to fight with me. I do not know if you are from God or not. If you are from God, I do not fear you because God knows my good will. If you are from the devil, I fear you even less.

The eyes those silent tongues of love. —CERVANTES

Catharism placed no value on one sex over the other; not only did it attract women as converts, but it invited them into the clergy.

I have to write. It's not an option. When I write, I am literally building myself a place in which to live. Once I'm firmly established within the narrative I pop awake in the morning and it's the first thing I think about. Not in an analytical way, as in "Oh, I haven't really reached the crisis point and it's already page 200—I'd better work on that." It's very much just running towards and into the place I most want to be.

I nod. I don't speak. His eyes rob me of words, they seem to draw the air from my mouth so that I can barely breathe.

That afternoon, I begin to learn the wisdom of keeping my feelings to myself, a lesson reinforced often during a childhood of female warfare and tricky, shifting alliances, so often that my genius for envasion at last approaches that of my mother. She may sleep with a mask, but by the time I am a teenager I have made one within myself, I have hidden my heart.

It's terrible to live believing that everything you do is of the utmost importance.

I reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story.

How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!

Joan of Arc was born 600 years ago. Six centuries is a long time to continue to mark the birth of a girl who, according to her family and friends, knew little more than spinning and watching over her father's flocks.

I've always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives.

Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution.

I was the good girl who never needed disciplining, who made straight A's. I applied and was accepted to Stanford University.

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.

I like vampires, tuberculosis, anything to do with blood. Then I read a biography of Rasputin and found out he'd had this daughter who had become a famous lion tamer and been billed as the daughter of the mad monk who was able to hypnotize animals with her eyes. It gave me a vision.

I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules.

I can't work out much about myself or what I see in the world around me unless I do it through writing.

I was raised by maternal grandparents who were born in 1890 and 1899, respectively. They were British subjects; George V was the cousin of the tsar. The Romanovs were very real in their household.

How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few.

I admire writers who succeed at what I consider the first demand of art: that the artist vivisect himself without pity, without hesitation, determined to reveal whatever he might find.