Sonya Hartnett > Quotes

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“I want my life to be mystifying," she declared, although she didn't know what she meant.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind's history must be scored bloody with heartbreak. This hankering for affection is a blight upon us.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“Life is lived on the inside. What's outside doesn't matter.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett

“How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“There is nothing that is more beautiful than everything else in the world.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

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

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

“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'.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Midnight Zoo

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Midnight Zoo

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss forever?"

"You can't," Feather answered. "You feel the loss forever. But you put it in a corner of yourself, and bit by bit some of your sorrow changes into joy. And that's how you go on living.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“It is scary, sometimes, Tomas admitted. But the scary bits are what make you brave.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Midnight Zoo

“She despised the sadness that hung inside her like old lace.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“There's fire in my fingers. I burn everything I touch.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly

“I would always be lonely, but no more alone.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“On the evening of her eighteenth birthday, Maddy opened her journal and made a list of the jewels and precious stones she'd held. Gold, diamond, emerald; ruby, turquoise, pearl; amber, jade, marble… There were some she had forgotten. Beneath these she listed what she thought were the most perfect tastes and smells. Coffee, cinnamon, peaches; vanilla, honey, basil; baking bread, fresh bread, toasting bread.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“Time crawled past on leaden hands and knees.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“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 -”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“Though she'd try to do otherwise, she had never been able to stop cluttering her present with her past. Now somebody she didn't know would pack her treasures into plastic bags and carry them away. A life, at its end, is a pile of cloth and paper, and goods that can be bagged and labelled. None of the best things - the voice and the laugh, the tilt of the head, the things seen and felt and spoken - are allowed to stay behind.”
― Sonya Hartnett

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly

“And she's striken with sudden nostalgia for the life she's been so eager to pack away, she wishes there was some way of being everything at once–grown and sure and clever, young and protected and new.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly

“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.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender