Quotes from Frances Hardinge

Bear, I need your eyes. I need your nose. I need your night-wits and forest-wisdom.

Neverfell was tired, so very tired. Waiting in her room to learn of her fate, her mind kept dropping away into sleep for numb instants no longer than a blink. Next moment her thoughts would jar her awake again, thrashing and crashing and clattering like a monstrous waterwheel, turning and turning without end or purpose. She jerked and stared and barely knew where she was, dream pieces floating like iceberg shards across her half-waking mind.

I died recently, and I am in no hurry to enjoy the experience again just yet.

I understand Neverfell, you see. For Neverfell, it is as if other people are part of her. When she believes they are in pain, it hurts her, like a wound in a pretend limb. So right now she is in pain for all the people she saw in the Undercity.

She's one of my best friends, thought Neverfell, and most of the time I don't know what is going on in her head at all.

What made a girl a damsel in distress? Were they not allowed claws? Mosca had a hunch that if all damsels had claws, they would spend a lot less time in distress.

Afterward it was hard to be sure exactly when the sublime light had dazzled their minds and driven them mad, since they went insane with such calm and dignity that nobody noticed.

You must not love them. It is easy to love power because power tells you it is majesty and beauty and greatness. But the gods were monsters. Do not even love their memory. The gods are dead.

For a second, she could almost see Caverna as the Kleptomancer did, a murky, monstrous beauty, smiling her fine-fanged smile as she prepared to stretch and grow, shaking out her tunnel-tresses as they became longer and longer. Perhaps Caverna had already known that such an opportunity was open to her. Neverfell imagined her discarding the Grand Steward like a worn-out toy, and reaching for a new favourite, a man who could extend her empire and bring her new strength . . . Maxim Childersin.

Suddenly he remembered Josh sitting on the motorbike and chatting with the bikers outside the pub—and he felt a throb of jealousy. It wasn't that he harbored any desire to sit on a motorbike, but...he wanted to be allowed to want to sit on a motorbike.

Sometimes she felt she would like to engulf him like a trap-lantern, and never share him with anyone or anything else again, not even the light. Even his obsession with ruling Caverna pained her, as if the city were a woman, and a rival.

We thought ourselves kings of the ages. Now we find that our civilization has been nothing but a brief, brightly lit nursery, where we have played with paper crowns and wooden scepters. Beyond the door are the dark wastes where Leviathans wrestled for millennia. We are a blink of an eye, a joke amidst a tragedy.

You stole my mother's Faces," whispered Neverfell. "You stole them, and you sold them, and you walked around wearing them, and using them to make people do what you wanted. You used my mother's Faces on me. And all the time you were her murderess or close enough. All that time you were trying to murder me.

The past was all around her. She could smell it. It did not feel dead. It felt alive, and as curious about her as she was about it.

He felt like a chess-master who, two moves from achieving checkmate, suddenly sees a live kitten dropped on to the middle of the board, scattering pieces.

He had been enjoying his explanation, and now she had spoiled things by knowing too much.

Just for a moment it reminded not-Triss of drawings she had seen in magazines and on book jackets, of pastel-colored parties where languid, fashionable women slunk and posed, slim and elegant as fish, and gentlemen passed them flutes of fat-bubbled champagne. The impression did not last long, however. The scene around her was too jarringly and robustly real. The accents were all too Ellchester, and some of the girls had knobbly ankles.

So what do you want?" asked Myrtle. "I want to help evolution." Evolution did not fill Faith with the same horror her father had felt. Why should she weep to hear that nothing was set in stone? Everything could change. Everything could get better. Everything was getting better, inch by inch, so slowly that she could not see it, but knowing it gave her strength.

I was always awake!" interrupted Faith. "I was always angry!

Besides, one cannot throw away everything that is touched by pain.

There were creases at the corners of her mouth, the marks of too many words bitten back.

In the interests of Truth, I would lie.

They were preparing to become memories.

I want to be a bad example," she said. "I see." Myrtle stirred herself, ready to walk to the prow. "Well, my dear, I think you have made an excellent start.