Quotes from Rachel Hartman

I felt lighter when I had finished, and for once emptiness was a sweet relief and a condition to be treasured.

Maybe the world isn't really different, but I am different, and I am in the world.

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.

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.

She still held sorrows, but she was not made of them. Her life was not a tragedy. It was a history, and it was hers.

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.

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.

The twin gods, Necessity and Chance, walked among the stars. What needed to be, was; what might be, sometimes was.

I gave you two choices as a test: there are never just two choices. That is a lie to keep you from thinking too deeply.

Always I hev my fists and my war pipes!

A thousand regrets I've had in love, A thousand times I've longed to change the past. I know, my love, there is no going back. No undoing of our thousand burdens. We must go on despite our heavy hearts. A thousand regrets I've had in love, but I shall never regret you.

There are melodies that speak as eloquently as words, that flow logically and inevitably from a single, pure emotion.

The resolve written in his eyes said no, but I could see exactly where I would have to push, and how hard, to break that resolve. It would be shockingly easy, but I found I did not wish it. ... Some part of him would break, along with his resolve, and I did not see a way to make it whole again. The jagged edge of it would stab at him all his life.

He didn't wear his heart on his sleeve, exactly, but he did keep it in a place where I could see it.

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.

You, of all people, understand the burden of having to prove that you are good enough to exist, that you are worth all the grief your mother caused everyone. Bastard equals monster in our hearts' respective lexicons; that's why you always had such insight into it.

I'm awestruck that you had warm cabbages sitting around.

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.

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.

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?

You will wander the dark places under the earth, but you will come back with the sun.

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.

I rose to standing, like Lars upon the barbican, the dark city spread at my feet. Lights twinkled in tavern windows, bobbed at the Wolfstoot Bridge construction. Once I had been suspended over this vast space, hanging and helpless, at a dragon's mercy. 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. We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.

It's such a relief after all these years to learn that you recovered from your fright," he said in a low voice, giving my hand a squeeze, "and that you grew up so pretty!" "Were you worried?" I asked, touched. "Yes. What were you, eleven? Twelve? At that age we're all gawky, and the outcome is always in doubt.