Kelly Barnhill > Quotes

“Knowledge is power, but it is a terrible power when it is hoarded and hidden.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“How many feelings can one heart hold?... Infinite, Luna thought. The way the universe is infinite. It is light and dark and endless motion; it is space and time, and space within space, and time within time. And she knew: there is no limit to what the heart can carry.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“Just because you don't see something doesn't mean it isn't there. Some of the most wonderful things in the world are invisible. Trusting in invisible things makes them more powerful and wondrous.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“My love isn't divided," she said. "It is multiplied.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“A story can tell the truth...but a story can also lie. Stories can bend and twist and obfuscate. Controlling stories is power indeed.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“Death is always sudden," Glerk said. His eyes had begun to itch. "Even when it isn't.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“There's no such thing as complete when it comes to stories. Stories are infinite. They are as infinite as worlds.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Iron Hearted Violet

“Everything you see is in the process of making or unmaking or dying or living. Everything is in a state of change.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“What is grief, but love that’s lost its object?”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“The heart is built of starlight
And time.
A pinprick of longing lost in the dark.
An unbroken chord linking the Infinite to the Infinite.
My heart wishes upon your heart and the wish is granted.
Meanwhile the world spins.
Meanwhile the universe expands.
Meanwhile the mystery of love reveals itself,
again and again, in the mystery of you.
I have gone.
I will return.
Glerk”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“Men, after all, delight in nothing so much as to recast themselves in the center of the story.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Some of us...choose love over power. Indeed, most of us do.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“The beautiful thing about science is that we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know. It requires an incredible amount of humility to be willing to be wrong nearly all the time. But we have to be willing to be wrong, and proven wrong, in order to increase knowledge overall. It is a thankless, and essential, job. Thank goodness.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.”
― Kelly Barnhill

“Not all knowledge comes from the mind. Your body, your heart, your intuition. Sometimes memories even have minds of their own.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“And the more they asked, the more they wondered. And the more they wondered, the more they hoped. And the more they hoped, the more the clouds of sorrow lifted, drifted, and burned away in the heat of a brightening sky.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“Memory was a slippery thing—slick moss on an unstable slope—and it was ever so easy to lose one’s footing and fall”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“It was a fine thing indeed, Luna thought, being eleven. She loved the symmetry of it, and the lack of symmetry. Eleven was a number that was visually even, but functionally not - it looked one way and behaved in quite another. Just like most eleven-year-olds, or so she assumed.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“When you apologize, however, you may begin healing yourself. It is not for us. It is for you. I recommend it.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“Anger is a funny thing. And it does funny things to us if we keep it inside. I encourage you to consider a question: Who benefits, my dear, when you forst yourself to not feel angry?" She tilted her head and looked at me so hard I thought she could see right into my bones. She raised her eyebrows. "Clearly not you.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Curiosity is the curse of the Clever. Or perhaps cleverness is the curse of the Curious. In any case, I am never lacking for either, I’m afraid, which does keep me rather busy.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“It's remarkable how quickly a person can get used to an impossible situation. How terror and panic can start to feel familiar, even ordinary.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“When power belongs, not to the violent, and not to the wealthy and well-connected, but to the people, a different sort of future begins to present itself.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Who benefits, my dear, when you force yourself to not feel angry?”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Embarrassment, as it turns out, is more powerful than information. And shame is the enemy of truth.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Stories have a tendency to seep across the shining membrane walls separating the universes. They whisper and flutter like the feathers of birds, from island to mainland and back again. They fall into dreams like rain.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Iron Hearted Violet

“A person's soul is bigger than his body. It takes root and lives in all who love him.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Mostly True Story of Jack

“There is nothing lewd about biology, research, or basic facts, gentlemen, and you make yourselves fools when you try to classify the quest for understanding as obscene. The only thing more patently obscene than ignorance is willful ignorance. Arrest yourselves.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“I was four years old when I first saw a dragon. I was four years old when I first learned to be silent about dragons. Perhaps this is how we learn silence - an absence of words, and absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Even imperfect things can be precious, after all. The choice itself is precious. The smallness and the largeness of an individual life does not change the fundamental honor and value of every manifestation of our personhood.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons