A. > A.'s Quotes

“Alas. I have a bad personality and a stupefying deficit of attention.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“Well, I tried, and therefore no one should criticize me.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“While she does like boys, she generally finds the traits of a compelling villain—arrogance, malice, an angsty backstory—tedious in a man. Like, what do hot guys with long dark hair even have to be that upset about? Get a clarifying shampoo and suck it up, Kylo Ren. So your rich parents sent you to magic camp and you didn’t make any friends. Big deal.”
― Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler

“O corse of the Locked Tomb," you extemporized wildly. "Beloved dead, hear your handmaiden. I loved you with my whole rotten, contemptible heart―I loved you to the exclusion of aught else―let me live long enough to die at your feet."

Then you went under to make war on Hell.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“It was worse when I was a kid. I remember the time you caught me telling her, "I love you,' and I can't even remember what you said, but I remember that I had you on your back - I put you straight on the fucking ground. I was always so much bigger and so much stronger. I got on top of you and choked you till your eyes bugged out. I told you that my mother had probably loved me a lot more than yours loved you. You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go you couldn't even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven?
Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?
You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, 'Suffer and learn'?
If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“You hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.”
― Tamsyn Muir

“Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“And instead you rolled a rock over me and turned your back. I spent all that time drowning and surfacing in you, over and over and over, and all because in the end you could not bear to do the one thing I asked you to do. I wanted you to use me, you malign, double-crossing, corpse-obsessed bag of bones, you broken, used-up shithead! I wanted you to live and not die, you imaginary-girlfriend-having asshole! Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“I'm not fucking dead," I said, which wasn't even true, and I was choking up; everything I'd ever done, everything I'd ever been through, and I was choking up.
As the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stood from his chair to look at you-- at me; looked at your face, looked at my eyes in your face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in your ears resolved into wordless screaming his expression was just--gently quizzical; mildly awed.
"Hi, Not Fucking Dead," he said. "I'm Dad.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“All I can say is that it was complicated back in Canaan House, and sometimes a cute older girl shows you a lot of attention, because she’s bored or whatever, and you sort of have this maybe-flirting maybe-not thing going on, right, and then it turns out she’s an ancient warrior who’s killed all your friends and she’s coming for you, and then you both die and she turns up ages later in the broiling heat on a sacred space station and like, it’s complicated. Just saying that it happens all the time.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“You remember how the fuck-off great aunts always used to say, Suffer and learn?

If they were right Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth