The Everlasting Quotes

“Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“I loved you by then, or would soon, or always had. It was inevitable, foretold: When I look up, I will see the sky; when I fight, I will win; when I meet Owen Mallory, I will love him.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Was that not how you loved someone? By hammering your body into whatever shape they liked best, and handing yourself to them like a hilt?”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“How sweet it was to die, knowing someone wanted you to live.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“I have loved you since before I was born, I think. I have studied you, worshipped you, lost you, mourned you.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“A throne was a kind of weapon by which the world was cut into two halves: the dead and the kneeling.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“If I couldn’t have you or heal you or save you—if I couldn’t love you—then I would make all of Dominion love you, forever and ever.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“I cannot be too young or too old, too beautiful or too ugly. I cannot weep or rage. I cannot refuse a man nor fuck him nor marry him—a queen is only powerful if there are no kings or princes nearby.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Forgive me-- a monster so rarely feels wanted.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“And I understood finally that a nation is a house with no windows or doors at all. That no matter what I did-no matter how much blood I spilled in its defense or ink I spent in its praise-it would never, ever be my home.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“For a king to hold the throne it takes skill, lucky genetics, good timing, and hard work; for a queen, it takes a fucking miracle.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“For once, I did not weep.
I only knelt for a while in the place where the woods had once been, but were no longer, until I understood what every person understands eventually: that I had left home and could never return to it, and that there would never be a time when I did not miss it.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Who first called you that, I wonder? But give me a name, and I will bring you his tongue.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Who is free, who loves another?”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“I wondered idly who had flinched from you before, and if you would prefer their thumbs or their ears in recompense.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“If there was no Hell waiting for us in the afterlife, I imagined you would build one with your bare hands just for me.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Most of all they learned one another, as few people ever have or will. In the churn and tumult of their lives—where summer did not always follow spring, where even their own names were tricksome and shifting—they were to one another what fixed stars are to sailors: the only way through the dark.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“They were to one another what fixed stars are to sailors: the only way through the dark.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“You led me into archives and private collections, libraries and museums, ancient ruins and family vaults. I excelled at the chase—I had a better-than-average memory and an eye for detail, and a mind that clicked obediently along like a series of bright brass gears. But it was like hunting in a hall of mirrors; I caught glimpses of bright armor or pale hair, but when I reached out, I touched nothing but glass.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“I understood what every person understands eventually: that I had left home and could never return to it”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Who, loving a painting, would want the raw canvas beneath it?”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“If it was a tragedy Yvanne wanted, I would make her weep; if it was blood she wanted, I would drown her in it.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“I have loved you since before I was born, I think. I have studied you, worshipped you, lost you, mourned you. I have wept at your bier and fought beneath your flag. I have killed you, Una, over and over. (...) This once, please—let me save you.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“I made a dismaying discovery that day: A journey which takes only a few paragraphs in a book takes considerably longer on horseback. Especially if the horse is old enough to draw a pension, and the woods are thick enough that there are no straight or obvious routes, but only slim game trails that weave and curl among the tress.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“She might have slit their throats in silence—she had learned to be silent as the fox is silent—but she was arrogant, and she was angry, so she called out to them first. She allowed them to scrabble blades from sheaths, spears from saddles.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting