Barbara Hambly Quotes

The question is always the answer, provided you want the answer badly enough.

— Barbara Hambly

“God has judged me all my life. But that is God's privilege, my lady. Not yours.”

— Barbara Hambly

“I simply don't shine in company. Mostly I prefer to retreat with a book.”

— Barbara Hambly

“We love people differently at different stages of our knowledge of them. As love changes its hape and its nature, we have to decide what we're going to do about that love on any given day.”

— Barbara Hambly

“As Cinderella would probably tell you, even a prince who only recognizes your footwear is preferable to a lifetime of cleaning grates.”

— Barbara Hambly

“One shouldn't allow oneself to be intimidated by something that can be picked up and tucked under one's arm.”

— Barbara Hambly

“The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God.”

— Barbara Hambly

Dragonsbane, they called him.
Slayer of dragons.
Or a dragon, anyway. And, he'd later found out, not such a very big one at that.

— Barbara Hambly

“Lexington wasn't a great city, like Philadelphia or New York, but around the Courthouse square, and along Main Street and Broadway, brick buildings reared two and three stories tall, and it was possible to buy almost anything: breeze-soft silks from France that came upriver from New Orleans, fine wines and cigars, pearl necklaces, and canes with ivory handles shaped like parrots or dogs'-heads or (in the case of Mary's older friend Cash Clay) scantily dressed ladies (but Cash was careful not to carry that one in company).”

— Barbara Hambly

“To the pure, all things are pure," Antryg remarked, in Magister Magus' best soothsayer voice, "and to the unimaginative, all things are devilish.”

— Barbara Hambly

Of course I'm frivolous," [Antryg] replied mildly. "You yourself must know how boring gravity is to oneself and everyone else.

— Barbara Hambly

“The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work.”

— Barbara Hambly

“Then someone within closed the door, shutting Norah out into the howling dust of the night. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the full moon's cold eye, then closed again. Wind seared over the pavilion's double roof, its voice rising to a shriek. Distantly, among the maze of walls, came the frenzied barking of hundreds of tiny dogs. As she drifted towards wakefulness, Norah could not tell whether it was the wind that she heard just at the end, or whether, within the dark hall, the girl had begun to scream.”

— Barbara Hambly

“She barely hid a smile. "That's a wizard's answer if I ever heard one." "Meaning that mages deal in double talk?" His grin was impish. "That's one of our two occupational hazards." "And what's the other one?" He laughed. "A deplorable tendency to meddle.”

— Barbara Hambly

“But that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about anything-that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it-and its choice to be there-are gone.”

— Barbara Hambly

“If I don't read page ninety, it won't have happened to them. Black Beauty will still live with all his friends at Birtwick Park ... The knights will be able to go on having jolly adventures without Lancelot meeting Guinevere and bringing the whole Round Table crashing down into ruin on their heads ...”

— Barbara Hambly

“Can you tell me the difference between a witch and a wizard?
Sure, a wizard is what they call you when they want to hire you, and a witch is what they call you when they're getting ready to run you out of town.”

— Barbara Hambly

If the other novice wizards on the row hadn't broken into Raeshaldis's rooms, pissed on her bed and written WHORE and THIEF on the walls, she probably would have been killed on the night of the full moon.

— Barbara Hambly

“The costumes help. They make it less real, disguise what it really is both for the actors and for the people who'll see it on the screen. It's like the people who read Anna Karenina, and because it's in Russia they can say, 'Oh, that's not my pain they're talking about.' And Chris is tough. She goes from one thing to the next and doesn't worry about the past. When a cat sits mere purring on your lap, you know for a fact she isn't thinking about her former owner; she's thinking about her dinner. That's Chris.”

— Barbara Hambly

“There is no temptation from outside the heart.”

— Barbara Hambly

“The universe, it appeared, had never been kind to Captain Bortrek, conspiring against him in a fashion that Threepio privately considered unlikely given the man's relative unimportance. Knowing what he did about the Alderaan social structure, shipping regulations, the psychology of law enforcement agents, and the statistical behavior patterns of human females, Threepio was much inclined to doubt that so many hundreds of people would spend that much time thinking up ways to thwart and injure a small-time free-trader who was, by his own assertion, only trying to make a living.”

— Barbara Hambly

“Funny," [Antryg] said, "if you're a mage, they always ask you to read the future, as if knowing it will help. I think three-fourths of all prayers prayed are for two and two not to equal four.”

— Barbara Hambly

“You mean magic is predicated on hope?"
"Hope," [Antryg] said, "and belief in life. We move blindly from second to second through time. Hope and magic both involve the casting forward of the soul. In a way, both magic and hope are a kind of madness.”

— Barbara Hambly

“Luke talks about the power that lies in the dark side. The Force isn't the only thing that has a dark side, Han. And the tricky thing about the dark side is that it's so easy to use-and it gets you what you think you want.”

— Barbara Hambly

“Someone asked me the other day what it feels like to see all my 'old stuff' reappearing, at long last, in digital. And I had to smile because to me it doesn't feel like 'old stuff.'”

— Barbara Hambly

“I have a couple of dozen books on my reader: ideal for a long trip or an afternoon waiting at the medical clinic. It's flexible.”

— Barbara Hambly

I wrote 'Time of the Dark' in 1978 and 'The Silent Tower' in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that's the great peril for real-world crossovers.

— Barbara Hambly

“It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.”

— Barbara Hambly

“What is merely a hypothesis to anyone else is an overwhelming temptation to a wizard.”

— Barbara Hambly

“Imagination is what has driven human progress since very early times.”

— Barbara Hambly

“You narrow hope when you define it ...”

— Barbara Hambly

“I always wanted to be a writer but everyone kept telling me it was impossible to break into the field or make money. I've proven them wrong on both counts.”

— Barbara Hambly