Hey there! Today, I have another Loving the Lines for you! Loving the Lines is dedicated to books with stand-out quotes that need to be shared. I’m often moved by passages and lines from the books I read, and I thought this would be a great way to show the love!! Many thanks to all the wonderful writers who inspire, empower, entertain, and make people think. Today, I’m sharing my favorite quotes from The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. This is such a brilliant read, and there are so many memorable and powerful quotes. Let’s check them out!
Title: The Everlasting
Author: Alix E. Harrow
Page Length: 320
Pub. Date: Oct. 28, 2025
Publisher: Tor
Synopsis: From Alix E. Harrow, the New York Times bestselling author of Starling House, comes a moving and genre-defying quest about the knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part–even if it breaks his heart.
Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters—but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten.
Centuries later, Owen Mallory—failed soldier, struggling scholar—falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives—and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.
But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend—if they want to tell a different story–they’ll have to rewrite history itself.
LINKS: Amazon | Goodreads | Review
They were to one another what fixed stars are to sailors: the only way through the dark.
You were Una Everlasting, the Drawn Blade, the Red Knight, and I was a boy again, choked with that covetous tangle of desire and desire-to-become that had driven me to war and back again, to archives and libraries and finally here, through time itself, to the far side of history. My whole life existed only to bear witness to yours, and God! it was worth it.
I knew as soon as I touched your hair that I’d made a mistake. The weight and texture of it—heavy and slick and tangled, like a thicket of silk—struck me as the sort of thing that might haunt a person, lingering like a wound and aching years later.
“I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am.”
“In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.”
“I have loved you since before I was born, I think. I have studied you, worshipped you, lost you, mourned you. I have wept at your bier and fought beneath your flag. I have killed you, Una, over and over.’ Your voice dragged now like a dull blade, whetting itself against me. The tips of your thumbs pressed into my flesh. ‘This once, please – let me save you.”
The world might remember you as I wrote you, but I would remember you as you were: hard and strange and silent, your hands bloodied and your soul sick with it. I would remember the line between your brows. I would remember that you were not beautiful, not really, but that the sight of you struck me as a hammer strikes hot iron, reordering my very atoms.
“I swayed, teetering on the edge of the thing that would transform me from no one into someone. It felt momentous, fateful, even. As if you had watched over me – haunted me, guided me, saved me thrice over – solely so that I could be here, now, with your name on my tongue.”
“We’ve been so many things – a legend, a history lesson, a lie – why not a fairy tale?”
“I loved you by then, or would soon, or always had. It was inevitable, foretold: When I look up, I will see the sky; when I fight, I will win; when I meet Owen Mallory, I will love him.”
The scholar looked down at his son and thought: Here, at last, is something worth dying for. The knight looked at the scholar, looking at his son, and thought: Here, at last, is something worth killing for.
The first kiss is like the first blow in a fight—a test, an invitation, a wordless question. But it seemed to me we already knew all the answers.
Dizzily, sickly, in a long string of metaphors, I saw everything we could make of love: chains, debts, cages, circles. And, too, I saw everything it could make of us: tragedies, traitors, madmen, cowards.
“History is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.”
Very moving lines! The ones that struck me in the feels were:
“They were to one another what fixed stars are to sailors: the only way through the dark.”
“I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am.”
“The first kiss is like the first blow in a fight—a test, an invitation, a wordless question. But it seemed to me we already knew all the answers.”
“It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.”
They’re all so powerful and poignant.
Love all of these! I highlighted so many passages while reading this book. So beautiful!
Yes! It was hard to narrow it down to this handful.