Rachel Hartman Quotes

We shall have long meetings where Kiggs agonizes and Glisselda teases him. That's the pattern so far.

Sometimes everyone does their best and things still go wrong.

Keeping my smile raised like a shield between us, I curtsied and quit the room.

Your credo goes further than you realized: walk on, yes, but don't walk past people who need you. Uncurl yourself so you can see them and respond.

You're not a villain, I said. Or else we were two villains in a pod.

What's a mother for but to be blamed?

The Saint - for I was convinced he was a Saint, indeed, whatever the rest of us might have been - now had a fistful of dangling mind-fire threads. "She is broken, this one, in her mind and heart," he said, carefully scooping up the blazing filaments and packing them back into Jannoula. "You must learn to fill yourself with yourself, Blessed."
"D-don't break her any further," I pleaded, feeling responsible.
He gave me a sidelong look, and for a moment I thought he was angry. But he said, "Would you break a mirror, Seraphina, because you fear to look into it?

All I know is that I've been called," said Pathka, his voice almost inaudible, like grit in the wind. "How do I live with myself if I don't answer?"
"You live/die," said Kikiu bitterly, using contradictory case. "Like the rest of us.

Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.

If I could keep a single moment for all time, that would be the one. I became the very air; I was full of stars.

However strenuously the world pulls us apart, however long the absence, we are not changed for being dashed upon the rocks. I knew you then, I know you now, I shall know you again when you come home.

Since we're being literal now, have you felt clear and sensible at other times during your travels?'
The question startled Tess into thinking. 'While turning hay. Swimming in the river, crawling through caves… once I was lying under a cattle guard, eating bread, and the sky was blue and there was a bee - ' She cut off, embarrassed. It was hard to explain about the bee.

You're stronger than you were when it happened.

Anyway, it wasn't that flavor of love. She could leave and carry it with her. Time would not put a dent in it, nor distance snuff it out.

Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!

Rest of the court, to watch the Golden Plays?" "I can't. Tomorrow is dress rehearsal for the Treaty Eve concert.

I spent that many years thinking I was alone. Then you prance into my life, nearly giving me a paroxysm, and now you deign to tell me there are more.

For me, art is the desire to preserve the intangible feeling of such a moment, hidden in all the littlest details, and then to communicate that to others.

These human eyes seemed weak to me at first," said Eskar, still staring away from me, scratching her short black hair. "They detect fewer colors and have terrible resolution, but they see things dragon eyes cannot. They can see beyond surfaces. I don't understand how that's possible, but it happened incrementally as I traveled with Orma: I began to see the inside of him. His questioning and gentle nature. His conviction. I'd glimpse it in something as incongruous as his hand holding a teacup, or his eyes when he spoke of you.

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

Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have - your voice, your eyes, your feeling and perspective. Other people have written great books, but no one else will ever write YOUR book. It's worth writing. That is the belief that carries me through.

Love is not a disease ... I cannot let them cut you out of me, nor her either. I will cling to my sickness, if it is a sickness. I will hold it close to me like the sun.

What was rage but a cover for some secret fragility, some sorrow?

She couldn't explain it except with the word: there. She was there. Present in herself. She wasn't always, so it was worth remarking upon.

Kiggs. "You were just a squire when they were banished; technically, you weren't banished at all." Maurizio

One foot in front of the other was all she could manage.

I don't mean to imply that they were cowards ... , Maurizio said, shrugging, clearly implying that [they] were cowards.

I'd had more than my share of beautiful today. Tomorrow I'd give some back, restore and replenish the world.

It is permissible to be the god of your own metaphors.

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

I hate this plan!" the surveyor was shouting. "The road was perfectly straight. This is a pimple in the face of my road!"
"Get out your equipment and mark us a perfect semicircle," said Arnando, cool as morning dew. "Make the best of it, you geometrical tyrant.

A keen wit stabs harder than a finely honed argument.

You are the traveler, taking this journey. You are the hero, writing this story. When the trickster Pau-Henoa wandered under the earth, what did he find?"
"The sun,"
"Right," said Chessey firmly. "Even the pagans knew: you will wander the dark places under the earth, but you will come back with the sun.

If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitable end up at a point of illogic, an article of faith? Even an indisputable fact must be chosen as the place to start reasoning, given weight by a mind that believed in its worth.

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.

No penance could be more terrible than this. Her very heart was dead.

Here's an analogy I like: guilt is a runaway wagon down the mountainside. It may carry you a long way, but it usually ends in disaster. Love, on the other hand, is much slower--just your own two feet, really," she said, casting a meaningful look at Tess. 'But it's more likely to take you somewhere worth going.

Always I hev my fists and my war pipes!

I was feverish; I couldn't keep down food. Orma stayed by me the entire time, and I suffered the illusion that behind his skin - behind everyone's - was a hollow nothingness, an inky black void. He rolled up my sleeve to look at my arm, and I shrieked, believing he would peel back my skin and see the emptiness beneath it.

She was the river, and the river had nothing to be ashamed of.

I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don't need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.

It was a place that wasn't a place, an inside that surrounded the outside.

He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.

Love is not a disease.

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.

Walk with an open heart, and you will hear the call. You will see your task shining before you, like a star.

Music is only work when someone else makes you do it.

What do you call someone who thinks deeply and can't stop talking about it?"
"A priest?" said Tess, mystified. "A philosopher?

My companions ate the bear. I found I had no appetite.

...emotions fly humans toward art

Some sober part of my brain seemed to observe everything I did, clucking disdainfully, informing me that ought to be embarrassed, yet making no move

The road was possibility, the kind she'd thought her life would never hold again, and Tess herself was motion. Motion had no past, only future. Any direction you walked was forward, and that was as must be.

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.

Interpretation gives knowledge value, but it must evolve as new knowledge emerges. From a myriad incomplete truth, a greater whole.

Ah, I could last a long time on those smiles. I would sow and reap them like wheat.

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.

All is well
or could be, if we worked to make it so. We were the fingers of the world, putting itself to rights.

He sighed. "So I've gone and revealed how much I admire your work for nothing. Now you'll feel free to laze about self-importantly, I suppose!"
"Viridius, no," I said, stepping toward him and impulsively kissing his balding head. "I'm well aware that that's your job."
"Damned right," he grumpily. "And I've earned it, too.

Crisis first, love later.

Love is a worthy motivation, although you see how quickly it can sour into guilt.

The world is surprisingly hard to destroy.

It's more like ... she has grown too big and feels trapped in her own skin.

The body is innocent. Deeply, beautifully, fundamentally innocent.

I do what I have always done. I reach across and bring the worlds together.

It matters less where you go than that you keep moving.

Sin is etched into women's very form.
To the devil with her form, then.

Tactile than olfactory - but I could discern nothing else about it.

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?

Please, Orma, I've already gotten you in so much trouble - "
"That I can't possibly get into more. Take it." He wouldn't stop glaring at me until I'd put the earring back on its cord. "You are all that's left of Linn. Her own people won't even say her name. I - I value your continued existence."
I could not speak; he had pierced me to my very heart.

Around us the darkness hovered tenderly. We passed through it.

It's as if I have just solved Skivver's predictive equations, or even better, as if I have intuited the One Equation, seen the numbers behind the moon and the stars, behind mountains and history, art and death and yearning, as if my comprehension is large enough that it can encompass universes, from the beginning to the end of time.

For future reference: do not underestimate the seductive power of math.

I didn't want this dance to end, or Kiggs to let go of my hand. I didn't want him to turn his eyes away, or live any other moment than this one.

Beggars, alas, could not be choosers.

Enough mind chatter. I imagined every thought encapsulated in a bubble; I exhaled them into the world. Gradually the noise ceased, and my mind was dark and still.

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.

He was laughing, silently, and then we were both laughing, and then something changed. It was as if I had been watching the world through oiled parchment or smoked glass, which was yanked abruptly away. Everything grew very clear and bright; the music burst forth in majesty; we stood still and the room turned around us; and there was Kiggs, right in the middle of all of it, laughing.

Why live in fear that he might find me disgusting someday, when I could make it happen right now?

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?

But are you finding monastic history a very compelling reason to live?"
"I'm not human," he said. "I don't require a reason to live. Living is my default condition."
I couldn't help it; I laughed, and teas weleld in my eyes. That answer was quintessentially Orma, distilled to his elemental Orma-ness.

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.

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.

Peaches and Cheese:
The vagabond sun winks down through the trees,
While lilacs, like memories, waft on the breeze,
My friend, I was born for days such as these,
To inhale perfume,
And cut through the gloom,
And feast like a king upon peaches and cheese!
I'll travel this wide world and go where I please,
Can't stop my wand'ring, it's like a disease.
My only regret as I cross the high seas:
What I leave behind,
Though I hope to find,
My own golden city of peaches and cheese!

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.

To Tess's immeasurable disappointment, she woke up.

Swept away was a fortuitous choice of words: it made her mad. She'd been swept away once - she'd let herself be, hoped and desired to be; that's how it always went in romantic stories.
She'd never be that passive again. It was far, far better to choose,

Get on with you, mooning about, wallowing in gooey sentiment. It doesn't change anything.
"It does, though," said Tess, a blaze igniting in her heart, a blue flame. "Maybe the world isn't really different, but I am different, and I am in the world."
Not just in it. She was 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.

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It was hard to fool someone who could tell what you were thinking.

The most useful virtues, for one who walked on, were flexibility and a willingness to improvise.

The darkness was full, fuller than she would ever have guessed, and she found this curiously comforting.

Are you in love with Prince Lucian?' screamed my uncle. 'What were you up to when I arrived? You weren't going to mate right here in the snow, were you?

Orma had given me a timepiece that emitted blasphemy-inducing chirps at whatever early hour I specified.

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

I think I've heard that ballad," I said. "It's beautiful but it ends sadly.

You twist logic to your own purposes." "It's a lawyer's duty," sniffed Phloxia,

I was drawn to his aloofness, the way cats gravitate toward people who'd rather avoid them.

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.

I mistook you for a metaphor.

Your lies didn't stop me loving you; your truth hasn't stopped me either.