Catherine Fisher Quotes

“Only the man who has known freedom
Can define his prison.”

— Catherine Fisher

Underground, the stars are legend.

— Catherine Fisher

“Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams. A wall at the world's end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this.”

— Catherine Fisher

“I remember a story of a girl in Paradise who ate an apple once. Some wise Sapient gave it to her. Because of it she saw things differently. What had seemed gold coins were dead leaves. Rich clothes were rags of cobweb. And she saw there was a wall around the world, with a locked gate.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Where are the leaders?' Sapphique asked.
'In the fortresses,' the swan replied.
'And the poets?'
'Lost in dreams of other worlds.'
'And the craftsmen?'
'Forging machines to challenge the darkness.'
'And the Wise, who made the world?'
The swan lowered its black neck sadly.
'Dwindled to crones and sorcerers in towers.”

— Catherine Fisher

“And what would they be scared of? There's nothing to fear in a perfect world, is there?”

— Catherine Fisher

“Once Incarceron became a dragon, and a Prisoner crawled into his lair. They made a wager. They would ask each other riddles, and the one who could not answer would lose. It it was the man, he would give his life. The Prison offered a secret way of Escape. But even as the man agreed, he felt its hidden laughter.
They played for a year and a day. The lights stayed dark. The dead were not removed. Food was not provided. The Prison ignored the cries of its inmates.
Sapphique was the man. He had one riddle left. He said, "What is the Key that unlocks the heart?"
For a day Incarceron thought. For two days. For three. Then it said, "If I ever knew the answer, I have forgotten it."
Sapphique in the Tunnels of Madness”

— Catherine Fisher

“We are chained hand and foot by protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world where men and women can't read, where the scientific advances of the ages are the preserve of the rich, where artists and poets are doomed to endless repetitions and sterile reworking of past masterpieces. Nothing is new. New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Time has stopped. Progress is forbidden”

— Catherine Fisher

“He had wanted so hard to Escape, to find the stars. And all he had found was a new prison.”

— Catherine Fisher

“I trust you, Jared," she whispered. "I always did. I love you, Master.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Finn smiled ruefully. I'm a Prisoner, old man. Just like you.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Even across the dark, even across the loss, even across the emptiness, soul will speak to soul”

— Catherine Fisher

“He worked night and day. He made a coat that would transform him; he would be more than a man; a winged creature, beautiful as light. All the birds brought him feathers. Even the eagle. Even the swan.”

— Catherine Fisher

“It's safe to tell a secret to one. Risky to tell it to two. To tell it to three is thoughtless folly, everyone else will know.”

— Catherine Fisher

The Art Magicke has rules. It means I have to teach you all my tricks. All the substitutions, the replications, the illusions. How to read minds and palms and leaves. How to disappear and reappear.
"How to saw people in half?"
"That too."
"Nice.

— Catherine Fisher

“When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Nothing has changed, or will change.
So we must change it.”

— Catherine Fisher

“I hate her."
Merlin laughed, tossing the stick down. "Not so. You have forgotten how to love. That's a different sorrow.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Master, I'm afraid. I am, truly. This place scares me. At home, I know who I am, what to do. I'm the Warden's daughter, I know where I stand. But this is a dangerous place, full of pitfalls. All my life, I've known it was waiting for me, but now I'm not sure I can face it. They'll want to absorb me, make me one of them, and I won't change. I won't! I want to stay me."
Jared sighed and she saw his dark gaze was fixed on the veiled window.
"Claudia, you're the bravest person I know. And no one will change you. You will rule here, though it won't be easy ...”

— Catherine Fisher

“All my life I have dreamed of you.”

— Catherine Fisher

“None of us have much idea where we are. Perhaps all our lives are too concerned with where, and not enough with who.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Rix stroked the Glove. "There was a garden and a tree grew there with golden apples and if you ate one of them, you knew everything. And then Sapphique climbed over the fense and killed the many-headed monster and picked the apple, because he wanted to know, you see. He wanted to know how to Escape."
"Right." She had wriggled back. She was close to his pocked face.
"And a snake came out of the grass and it said, 'Oh go on, eat the apple. I dare you.' And he stopped then with it to his mouth because he knew the snake was Incarceron."
Keiro groaned. "Let me ... "
"Put the Glove away, Rix. Or give it to me."
His fingers caressed its dark scales. "And because if he ate it he would know how small he was. How much of a nothing he was. He would see himself as a speck in the vastness of the Prison."
"So he didn't eat it, right?”

— Catherine Fisher

“Shadow turned. Her eyes were wet; she smiled at him wanley. I'll be she loved you.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Chloe turned to Vetch. The poet said gently, "You see, you do have power. Words give you power, to create or destroy." His eyes flickered to Clare. "Even to forgive ...”

— Catherine Fisher

:Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.

— Catherine Fisher

Sapphique strapped the wings to his arms and flew, over oceans and plains, over glass cities and mountains of gold. Animals fled; people pointed up. He flew so far, he saw the sky above him and the sky said, "Turn back, my son, for you have climbed too high." Sapphique laughed, as he rarely did. "Not this time. This time I beat on you until you open."
But Incarceron was angered, and struck him down.

— Catherine Fisher

“Shut up!" Finn turned, furious. "Look at you both! The only friends I have in this hell and all you can do is fight over me. Do either of you care about me? Not the seer, the fighter, the fool who takes all the risks, but me, Finn?”

— Catherine Fisher

“We forbid growth and therefore decay. Ambition, and therefore despair. Because each is only the warped relection of the other.”

— Catherine Fisher

“None of us know who we are any more.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Understanding's not enough. Understanding's from outside; merely a function of the mind. [ ... ] To enter, that's the secret. To become the bridge, to crawl into its sap, to sway with it, to rot over centuries as its heartwood rots. When you are the bridge you will know what the bridge knows. It takes time. A lifetime. And skill.”

— Catherine Fisher

“As the beast I took your finger.
As the Dragon I give you my hand.
Now you have crawled and clambered into my heart
I can't see you anymore.
Are you still there?”

— Catherine Fisher

“All my life I've plotted and planned, been obsessed with those things.
And now you've achieved them. You are not satisfied. He nodded.
Life is a series of stairs of which we climb, Claudia ... your horizons have moved.”

— Catherine Fisher

“It is not wise for a mortal man to gaze too long into the darkness. He comes to see strange shapes and cold imaginings. He comes to doubt all that he once held true.”

— Catherine Fisher

“If a speculum is polished sufficiently, it becomes invisible. For it doth reflect all about it, so that the eye sees only that which is shown , not the devyse that showeth it. And if a man becomes hard as diamond, faceted and flawed, he too will show nothing of himself, onlie the fractured images of his world.”

— Catherine Fisher

Walls have ears. Doors have eyes. Trees have voices. Beasts tell lies. Beware the rain. Beware the snow. Beware the man You think you know.

— Catherine Fisher

“How could you betray me, Incarceron? How could you let me fall? I thought I was your son. It seems I am your fool. -Songs of Sapphique”

— Catherine Fisher

“Because sometime, somehow, the god spoke your name. You took a step too far and here you are. None of us can ever go back. Even if we wanted to.”

— Catherine Fisher

“No one has entered since. We know about the Wombs too, though not where they are. Incarceron is efficient; it was designed to be. It doesn't waste dead matter, but recycles everything. In those cells it grows new inmates. Perhaps animals too.”

— Catherine Fisher

“You are my father, Incarceron.
I was born from your pain.
Bone of steel; circuits for veins.
My heart a vault of iron.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Down the endless halls of quilt
My silver thread of tears is split.
My fingerbone the key that broke
My blood the oil that smooth the lock.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Everyone has memories, Finn. Your prophecies are what matter. The visions that descend on you are the great gift and strangeness of the Starseer. They're unique. The people know that, the slaves and the warband, even Jormanric.It's in the way they look at you. Sometimes they fear you.”

— Catherine Fisher

“Do you seek the key to Incarceron?
Look inside yourself. It has always been hidden there.
- The mirror of dreams to Sapphique”

— Catherine Fisher

“What use is one key among a billion prisoners?”

— Catherine Fisher

“Daring is the thing for a fighting man to be remembered by.”

— Catherine Fisher

“It had silenced Jormanric in mid-fury, had made the hairs on his own skin prickle with terror. The Prison was alive. It was cruel and careless, and he was Inside it.”

— Catherine Fisher

“She stared out. She saw a vastness, a rising shape, indistinct in the rain, gray in the misty drizzle. At first she had thought it was a cloud, a great bank of fog drifting up over the mountains, but now she realized with a cold awe that it was real, a vast building climbing the mountainside, rising in a countless series of rooms, stairways, balconies, and galleries, far away and immense, its topmost roofs white with snow. And up there, like a needle sharp with ice, one uttermost pinnacle flew the remote black pennant of the Watch.
The Tower of Song.”

— Catherine Fisher

“A distant, eerie howl had risen out of the floor, from far beneath. Silent, absolutely still, she waited, and at last it came again, indefinably closer, but muffled, as if layers of stone-rooms, dungeons, cellars-were between her and it. Not human. She crouched down with her ear to the stone slabs. Somewhere down there, unguessable levels below,something prowled.”

— Catherine Fisher

“I often write in pencil on paper and then type up later. It's much quicker than using a keyboard.”

— Catherine Fisher

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.

— Catherine Fisher

“I have walked a stair of swords, I have worn a coat of scars. I have vowed with hollow words, I have lied my way to the stars -Songs of Sapphique”

— Catherine Fisher