Best 34 quotes of Sonya Hartnett on MyQuotes

Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.

A small town is nothing but eyes and gaping maw; it pecks at its own like a flock of vicious birds.

A small town has as many eyes as a fly

Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.

How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.

It is scary, sometimes, Tomas admitted. But the scary bits are what make you brave.

Let me fly, let me see things that are hidden from other eyes.

Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.

More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.

My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.

She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.

She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.

Strange how love coexists with hate, how they render eachother mute, how the swilling of them together makes a new and softer, sympathetic thing.

Yeah, reflections! The same, but different. Like twins - like blood brothers! And when you need something bad done, like punishment or revenge, you'll just ask me, and I will do it -

You're not supposed to have iron bars around you - no one is supposed to have that. You're supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That's what happens when you're alive.

Andrej thought about it - the notion that the world was riddled with holes where certain people and animals were meant to be, but weren’t.

He's used to the freedom of neglect; he likes it.

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of a cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

I fail to see how turning the subject over like compost can do anything except raise its stink.

I felt dry as if someone had skinned me. I was not the bones and meat, but the cast-aside skin. The heat had hollowed me.

I looked along the aisle and saw her, and it was as if I saw her for the first time. Everything changed. The ancient featureless interior of me spangled orange, mint, cat-blue. I looked back to the window immediately, my face damp, my breath caught. And worried I would never have the courage to look at her again.

In the quest for power, truth is always the first thing left behind.

I sensed that he was dead, but wasn't sure if death was forever. It seemed best to stay nearby, in case the chance came to make everything changed.

Nonethless it had been a castle, with all that this implies: it had had towering walls and turrets, beams as great as trees, arched doorways wide enough for processions to pass through, ceilings so cavernous that owls nested in them. It had had wings and ramparts and thin windows from which to shoot arrows, internal courtyards, banquet rooms, hidden doors, secret passages. It had had a chapel and, in its bowels, a dungeon. It housed sculptures and paintings, tapestries and cushions, carpets and carvings, its fortressed heart had been clad in glit, silver, glass, gold, damask, ivory, ermine.

She was the one who wanted to be with him, the one who watched and waited for him, who felt his absence badly.

The quest for power is strange in that, once the quest has begun, the destination always seems to shift ever further away. What power one has is never enough; whatever happiness one had turns to bitterness.

Time crawled past on leaden hands and knees.

Watching, she had felt unusually and keenly alive, alive the way a knife is sharp, so that the humiliation she was enduring was perfect, like the paring of skin from a hard apple.

We walked into the forests which encircled the town. I have never liked them, their dark throat, their sullen height, their slump-shouldered gloom. But Evangeline walked steadily into their maw, and I followed her. She wanted to see the swathes which, years ago, the firebug had burned. The furnaced forest was green again, though here and there stood leafless trunks cindered to the core; on the scruffy dirt lay stiff black limbs tangled in morning-glory. Evangeline touched her palm to the charcoal, murmured, 'Poor things.

You're just a coward, like all those who stand behind the suffering of others.