We would all be incredibly boring to a vampire who is 400, 500 years old. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup – a little went a long way. Like cilantro. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
Often, in books, I find female power to be cartoonish – power is a process, an evolution – it has responsibilities. It’s not as simple as picking up your lightning bolt and throwing it at someone. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
Falling in love is really relatively easy compared to staying in love and building a family that lasts. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That’s one of the highlights of working in fiction. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
I’m a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I’ve been studying magic and the occult since about 1983. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show – in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever – is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
Witches are the kind of more traditional, home and family, craft people – so they’re the ones who are making things; crocheting shawls and things like that. But then they also have that slightly confident, dangerous, edge. I always see them as having very extreme hair, either amazingly beautiful straight hair or kind of wild. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
I found a ‘lost’ manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee’s interest in magic. Of course, it wasn’t really lost. It was there, in the catalog. Deborah Harkness Read Quote
