Barbara Hambly > Quotes

“The question is always the answer, provided you want the answer badly enough.”
― Barbara Hambly, The Time of the Dark

“God has judged me all my life. But that is God's privilege, my lady. Not yours.”
― Barbara Hambly, The Armies of Daylight

“I simply don't shine in company. Mostly I prefer to retreat with a book.”
― Barbara Hambly, Bride of the Rat God

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Night's Edge

“As Cinderella would probably tell you, even a prince who only recognizes your footwear is preferable to a lifetime of cleaning grates.”
― Barbara Hambly, Sold Down the River

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“To the pure, all things are pure,” Antryg remarked, in Magister Magus’ best soothsayer voice, “and to the unimaginative, all things are devilish.”
― Barbara Hambly, The Silent Tower

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Bride of the Rat God

“The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work.”
― Barbara Hambly, The Silicon Mage

“One shouldn't allow oneself to be intimidated by something that can be picked up and tucked under one's arm.”
― Barbara Hambly, Bride of the Rat God

“There is no temptation from outside the heart.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, The Witches of Wenshar

“Of course I’m frivolous,” [Antryg] replied mildly. “You yourself must know how boring gravity is to oneself and everyone else.”
― Barbara Hambly, The Silent Tower

“Lexington wasn't a great city, like Philadelphia or New York, but around the Courthouse square, and along Main Street and Broadway, brick buildings reared two and three stories tall, and it was possible to buy almost anything: breeze-soft silks from France that came upriver from New Orleans, fine wines and cigars, pearl necklaces, and canes with ivory handles shaped like parrots or dogs'-heads or (in the case of Mary's older friend Cash Clay) scantily dressed ladies (but Cash was careful not to carry that one in company).”
― Barbara Hambly, The Emancipator's Wife: A Novel of Mary Todd Lincoln

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Sisters of the Raven

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“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… ”
― Barbara Hambly, Bride of the Rat God

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, The Time of the Dark

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Bride of the Rat God

“Maggots from meat,’” quoted John, “‘weevils from rye, dragons from stars in an empty sky.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“Hidden within the heart of the great rose of music, he could forget time and place, forget the sting of his cut lip and the white man who’d given it to him, who had the right by law to give it to him; forget the whole of this past half year. For as long as he could remember, music had been his refuge, when grief and pity and rage and incomprehension of the whole of the bleeding world overwhelmed him: It had been a retreat, like the gentle hypnotism of the Rosary.”
― Barbara Hambly, A Free Man of Color

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“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.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“However, her own lack of power had taught her a curious appreciation for small joys and hard beauties and for the simple, changeless patterns of life and death.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“The key to magic is magic, Caerdinn had said. To be a mage, you must be a mage. There is no time for anything else, if you will come to the fullness of your power.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane