Time's Convert Quotes

“No act of creation has ever been painless,” she continued. “Miracles should leave a mark, so that we can remember how precious they are.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“War is such a waste of women’s time.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Folks are always in favor of fairness, until they have to give up something they have to someone else.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. —THOMAS PAINE”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Too soon? There is no such thing,” Ysabeau said. “We are, all of us, asked to grow up too quickly. It is the way the gods remind us that life, no matter how long, is still but a breath.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Saying no takes courage—far more courage than saying yes.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Rules may teach you to be blindly obedient, but they’re no real protection against the world,”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Thomas Paine had come to believe that religion was the worst form of tyranny because it pursued you through death and into eternity—something no king or despot had yet managed to do. At last, Marcus settled on repeating something Thomas himself had written. “ ‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“To be a vampire you must choose life—your life, not someone else’s—over and over again, day after day,” Ysabeau said. “You must choose it over sleep, over peace, over grief, over death. In the end, it is our relentless drive to live that defines us. Without that, we are nothing but a nightmare or a ghost: a shadow of the humans we once were.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Um Vampir zu sein, muss man sich für das Leben entscheiden - für das eigene Leben, nicht das eines anderen - und zwar Tag für Tag. Du musst dein Leben über den Schlaf, über den Frieden, über die Trauer und über den Tod stellen. Letztendlich definiert uns unser unausgesetzter Wunsch nach Leben. Ohne ihn sind wir nichts als Albträume, als Gespenster: Schatten der Menschen, die wir einst waren.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“And the only true fence against the world and all its dangers is a thorough knowledge of it,” Matthew said as we rocked in silence, together.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“As for this darkness we all feel, you will tell me about it one day. I will not take the knowledge from you.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Oh, humanity is marvelously creative when it comes to death and suffering,”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“It took me eighteen hours to bring that boy into the world, and no time at all for some idiot with a gun to steal him away.” Mistress Bishop pulled a small bottle out of her pocket. “War is such a waste of women’s time.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“And it was written by a man who owns hundreds of slaves,”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“The declaration made in Philadelphia said all men are created equal—not some men,”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. —THOMAS PAINE”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Miracles should leave a mark, so that we can remember how precious they are.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“The touch we feel as a restraint when we are younger has a way of bringing us comfort later in our lives.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Even for Philadelphia, it had been a prodigiously warm summer. “Why hasn’t Dr. Franklin invented a way to stop it?”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“We are fighting a war to loosen the grip of tradition, not to be enslaved by it further,”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“For all men being originally equals, no ONE by BIRTH could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, Marcus read, and though himself might deserve SOME decent degree of honors of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“To be a vampire you must choose life—your life, not someone else’s—over and over again, day after day,”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Very well, Marcus Raphael Galen Thomas Chauncey de Clermont,” his grandfather at last pronounced. “I accept you into the family. You will be known as Marcus de Clermont—for now.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Marcus was troubled by the distance between the community’s language of brotherly love and equality and the fact that the Brethren owned slaves. It had bothered him in Hadley, too, and in the army, that men could espouse the ideals of liberty and equality in Common Sense and yet still treat Zeb Pruitt or Mrs. Dolly like they were lesser beings.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“The declaration made in Philadelphia said all men are created equal—not some men,” Marcus said, in spite of his misgivings. “And it was written by a man who owns hundreds of slaves,” Joshua replied.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Bright Borns were creatures born to a weaver mother and a vampire father afflicted with blood rage, a genetic condition that could also be traced back to daemon blood. They were as rare as unicorns.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Weavers were witches with daemon blood in their veins.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“Evermore, sang their two hearts. Evermore.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert