Quotes from Barbara Hambly

I have a couple of dozen books on my reader: ideal for a long trip or an afternoon waiting at the medical clinic. It's flexible.

You narrow hope when you define it.

Imagination is what has driven human progress since very early times.

The question is always the answer, provided you want the answer badly enough.

God has judged me all my life. But that is God's privilege, my lady. Not yours.

I simply don't shine in company. Mostly I prefer to retreat with a book.

But that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about anything—that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it—and its choice to be there—are gone.

We love people differently at different stages of our knowledge of them. As love changes its hape and its nature, we have to decide what we're going to do about that love on any given day.

As Cinderella would probably tell you, even a prince who only recognizes your footwear is preferable to a lifetime of cleaning grates.

To the pure, all things are pure," Antryg remarked, in Magister Magus' best soothsayer voice, "and to the unimaginative, all things are devilish.

Dragonsbane, they called him. Slayer of dragons. Or a dragon, anyway. And, he'd later found out, not such a very big one at that.

One shouldn't allow oneself to be intimidated by something that can be picked up and tucked under one's arm.

The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God.

The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work.

There is no temptation from outside the heart.

Can you tell me the difference between a witch and a wizard? Sure, a wizard is what they call you when they want to hire you, and a witch is what they call you when they're getting ready to run you out of town.

Of course I'm frivolous," [Antryg] replied mildly. "You yourself must know how boring gravity is to oneself and everyone else.

If I don't read page ninety, it won't have happened to them. Black Beauty will still live with all his friends at Birtwick Park … The knights will be able to go on having jolly adventures without Lancelot meeting Guinevere and bringing the whole Round Table crashing down into ruin on their heads…

The room was a magpie-nest of picked-at knowledge, the lair of a tinkerer to whom the universe was one vast toyshop of intriguing side issues.

Maggots from meat,'" quoted John, "'weevils from rye, dragons from stars in an empty sky.

We are like the whales that live in the sea, he said, civilizations without artifacts, living between stone and sky in our islands in the northern oceans.

The diamond cannot love the flower, for the flower lives only a day, then fades and dies. You are a diamond now." " The flower dies," Jenny said softly, "having lived. The diamond will never do either.

She barely hid a smile. "That's a wizard's answer if I ever heard one." "Meaning that mages deal in double talk?" His grin was impish. "That's one of our two occupational hazards." "And what's the other one?" He laughed. "A deplorable tendency to meddle.

If the other novice wizards on the row hadn't broken into Raeshaldis's rooms, pissed on her bed and written WHORE and THIEF on the walls, she probably would have been killed on the night of the full moon.