Barbara Hambly Quotes

Then someone within closed the door, shutting Norah out into the howling dust of the night. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the full moon's cold eye, then closed again. Wind seared over the pavilion's double roof, its voice rising to a shriek. Distantly, among the maze of walls, came the frenzied barking of hundreds of tiny dogs. As she drifted towards wakefulness, Norah could not tell whether it was the wind that she heard just at the end, or whether, within the dark hall, the girl had begun to scream.

There is no temptation from outside the heart.

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

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.

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.

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

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

She felt angry enough to curse them, but in her heart she knew that she could lay no greater curse upon them than to be what they already were.

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.

She understood that even the worst days contained only twenty-four hours. One did what one had to do to get through them, and afterwards, one slept.

The costumes help. They make it less real, disguise what it really is both for the actors and for the people who'll see it on the screen. It's like the people who read Anna Karenina, and because it's in Russia they can say, 'Oh, that's not my pain they're talking about.' And Chris is tough. She goes from one thing to the next and doesn't worry about the past. When a cat sits mere purring on your lap, you know for a fact she isn't thinking about her former owner; she's thinking about her dinner. That's Chris.

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

I wrote 'Time of the Dark' in 1978 and 'The Silent Tower' in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that's the great peril for real-world crossovers.

You narrow hope when you define it ...

Funny," [Antryg] said, "if you're a mage, they always ask you to read the future, as if knowing it will help. I think three-fourths of all prayers prayed are for two and two not to equal four.

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.

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.

What is merely a hypothesis to anyone else is an overwhelming temptation to a wizard.

It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.

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

If any town in Europe would have vampires, he knew it would be Prague.

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.

The universe, it appeared, had never been kind to Captain Bortrek, conspiring against him in a fashion that Threepio privately considered unlikely given the man's relative unimportance. Knowing what he did about the Alderaan social structure, shipping regulations, the psychology of law enforcement agents, and the statistical behavior patterns of human females, Threepio was much inclined to doubt that so many hundreds of people would spend that much time thinking up ways to thwart and injure a small-time free-trader who was, by his own assertion, only trying to make a living.

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.

Someone asked me the other day what it feels like to see all my 'old stuff' reappearing, at long last, in digital. And I had to smile because to me it doesn't feel like 'old stuff.'

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.

After long years of solitary meditation, Jenny had come to accept that, for her, magic was a depth and a stillness rather than the moving brilliance that it was for the great.

She had come to terms with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius in the single thing she had ever wanted.

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