Quotes from A Skinful of Shadows

Frances Hardinge ·  416 pages

Rating: (1.6K votes)


“If someone throws aside their pride and begs with all their heart, and if they do so in vain, then they are never quite the same person afterwards. Something in them dies, and something else comes to life.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


“Everybody betrayed her, so why expect otherwise? But it turned out that distrust could fool you and endanger you, just as trust could.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


“Mother was like this sometimes. Conversations became riddles with traps in them, and your answers had consequences.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


“Looking at the rich and powerful was dangerous, like peering into the sun.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


“Habits, places and faces grew into you over time, like tree roots burrowing into stone work.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows



“Lord Fellmotte was not a man. He was an ancient committee. A parliament of deathly rooks in a dying tree.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


“Even when she slept, her anxieties did not.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


“Before her escort could react, she sprinted out from their little pool of lantern-light into the darkness, her feet pounding the soft, treacherous clods of the field. The guards called after her for a while, but did not pursue, In a lost city, how could they chase down every lost soul who became a little more lost?”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


“The minister was kind when you met him in the street, but terrifying in the pulpit. From the rapt faces of the other listeners, Makepeace could tell that there must be great truths shining in him, and love like a cold white comet.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


“His gaze made her feel like a mouse in owl-country.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows



“I trust you, she had often told him. But was that true?

No, she realized, with a feeling like grief. All these years, even while she plotted with James, in her heart of hearts she had been waiting for him to betray her. When at last she had looked into his eyes and seen a host of dead enemies staring back, her mind had filled with a storm. But there had been an eye to that storm, a quiet core where a calm, relieved voice was saying: Ah, there it is at last. No more waiting for the sword to fall.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


“The Bible says we should know a tree by the fruit it bears," Makepeace replied, a little sharply. "If you burn my hand off, what should I think of you?”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows


About the author

Frances Hardinge
Born place: Kent, The United Kingdom
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“In the context of real life, the Bible seems refreshingly whole, an honest reflection on humanity in relation to the sacred and the profane.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read


“The doctor's wife ate two apples a day, just to be safe. But her husband kept coming home.”
― Joseph Gordon-Levitt, quote from The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 1


“What light is to the outer physical world intellect is to the inner world of consciousness. For intellect is related to the will, and thus also to the organism which is nothing other than will regarded objectively, in the approximate same way as light is to a combustible body and the oxygen in combination with which it ignites.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, quote from Essays and Aphorisms


“Through all the machismo, through all the greed, through all the discussion of shareholder values, it all came down to this: John Gutfreund and Tom Strauss were prepared to scrap the largest takeover of all time because their firm’s name would go on the right side, not the left side, of a tombstone advertisement buried among the stock tables at the back of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


“John and Paul always had a special link between them, a chemistry that added to the heat: they knew intuitively how to share the stage and the limelight, how to spar with each other and how to play the audience so that the girls went wild.”
― Cynthia Lennon, quote from John


Interesting books

Going Bovine
(28.4K)
Going Bovine
by Libba Bray
Calvin and Hobbes
(125.7K)
Calvin and Hobbes
by Bill Watterson
Isla and the Happily Ever After
(85.3K)
Isla and the Happily...
by Stephanie Perkins
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
(18.7K)
All I Really Need to...
by Robert Fulghum
Eona: The Last Dragoneye
(33.1K)
Eona: The Last Drago...
by Alison Goodman
Succubus on Top
(27.4K)
Succubus on Top
by Richelle Mead

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.