174 Quotes by Frances Hardinge

Trust was like mould. It accumulated over time in unattended places... Over the years, Makepeace had become encrusted with other people’s inattentive trust.

Well, you will have to do. If you had died along with your mother, I would have taught the cat to read.

Over this year, familiarity had done its usual work, picking off the gilded paint one scratch at a time.

Making a wish is like saying, ‘I can’t deal with anything, I give up, somebody bigger come along and solve it all instead.

He had been enjoying his explanation, and now she had spoiled things by knowing too much.

Perhaps illnesses could be left behind, just like small, badly concealed china corpses.

There was another kind of beauty, however, and everyone on the Myriad knew it. A twisted beauty that turned your stomach even while it turned your head. Frecht was the old word, a harsh word ragged with superstitious awe. It was an ugliness and otherness that could only be holy, a breach of the rules that echoed those that no rules coul bind.

She is the key to this mystery, a key that I will turn, by hook or by crook.

We thought ourselves kings of the ages. Now we find that our civilization has been nothing but a brief, brightly lit nursery, where we have played with paper crowns and wooden scepters. Beyond the door are the dark wastes where Leviathans wrestled for millennia. We are a blink of an eye, a joke amidst a tragedy.