64 Quotes by Kathryn Harrison

My days are as long as despair can make them.

The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.

We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.

The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years' War and of history.

I think in terms of the parents that I had, I sort of drew a bad hand, or bad karma; who knows? And I did have a family that was complicated, with some quite eccentric members. So there was a lot of grist there.

A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

For years, the place I really lived - the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about - was 15th-century France.

How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!