More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.

Sonya Hartnett

Categorized in : Children Believe Heart

She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.

Sonya Hartnett

butterfly cat beautiful

She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.

Sonya Hartnett

wall desire doors

Let me fly, let me see things that are hidden from other eyes.

Sonya Hartnett

sonya let-me eye

Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.

Sonya Hartnett

rain love-is night

You're not supposed to have iron bars around you - no one is supposed to have that. You're supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That's what happens when you're alive.

Sonya Hartnett

lonely rain fall

Words on the page are never prisoners of the page

Sonya Hartnett

prisoner pages

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

Sonya Hartnett

sky blue bird

Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.

Sonya Hartnett

despair fool water

I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind's history must be scored bloody with heartbreak. This hankering for affection is a blight upon us.

Sonya Hartnett

pain disappointment stupid

Strange how love coexists with hate, how they render eachother mute, how the swilling of them together makes a new and softer, sympathetic thing.

Sonya Hartnett

strange hate together

My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.

Sonya Hartnett

fear letting-go moving

A small town has as many eyes as a fly

Sonya Hartnett

small-town towns eye

Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.

Sonya Hartnett

fairy-stories trying way

I want my life to be mystifying," she declared, although she didn't know what she meant.

Sonya Hartnett

knows want

Life is lived on the inside. What's outside doesn't matter.

Sonya Hartnett

matter life-is

There is nothing that is more beautiful than everything else in the world.

Sonya Hartnett

beautiful world

How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?

Sonya Hartnett

crafts important doe

I would always be lonely, but no more alone.

Sonya Hartnett

lonely

It is scary, sometimes, Tomas admitted. But the scary bits are what make you brave.

Sonya Hartnett

scary brave sometimes

I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.

Sonya Hartnett

miserable-life miserable people