Quotes from Rachel Hartman

It looked like our gods, to me - not literally, not in the way they're depicted in statues, but the vibrant space between them, where Necessity is Chance and Chance flows into Necessity. The world is as it must be, and as it happens to be, and those are the same thing, connected and right, and you understand and love all of it, because you are all of it, and all of it is you.

First, 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. Second, and more important: the body is innocent. Deeply, beautifully, fundamentally innocent.

I'm not saying don't run—or walk, as you say—only that it sounds incomplete, as a life's philosophy. I meant to prompt you to think further. What do you do when you get there?" "You don't get there . You're on the Road, and the Road goes ever on and on.

The Kiggs-Phina way...

Walk on, yes, but don't walk away from people who need you.

When the rest of the mind has fled, sometimes there's music left.

Crisis first, love later.

We name something to make it real, to give it meaning.

Tess had thought her grandmother, somewhat poetically, as having come unbuttoned from time.

I—I value your continued existence.

I became the very air; I was full of stars. I was the soaring spaces between the spires of the cathedral, the solemn breath of chimneys, a whispered prayer upon the winter wind. I was silence, and I was music, one clear transcendent chord rising toward Heaven.

Your very presence makes other people feel awkward. You stand out when in fact you'd rather not.

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?

All roads were one, surely, even if their textures differed. Was she as varied, a part of herself as rough and tutted as the Goreddi roads, and some other part as efficient as the Ninysh? She often felt, early in the morning, when the world seemed most malleable, that she contained these potentials, and more. It wasn't merely that she could be anything, but that she was everything, all at once.

This is my road. I'm so happy you came and traveled with me.

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.

Walk with me—I won't let you fall.

One thing I've learned about grief: it's like a creditor's bill. You can put off paying, but it eventually falls due, and exacts usurious interest.

Tess had been unaware of leaving anything behind, but to hear Jacomo tell it, he'd played a long, slow game of connect-the-dots, and each dot had been a kindness, farm chores, laughter, a story told. She'd passed through the world, and the world had remembered.

Invisible factors in my life would inevitably lead to my downfall. I felt I had known this all along. There was no escape.

People stood at the edge, gaping foolishly, because they didn't believe it. The chasm was too big to understand.

From some angles, up is toward the earth and down toward the sky, and everything—people, horses, cathedrals, dreams—is suspended over the ceaseless void, barely hanging on.

Sometimes everyone does their best and things still end up wrong.

Her fierce blue eyes met mine only for a second, but in that fragile eternity I glimpsed the mind behind the manners; in that endless instant, I knew.