Seanan Mcguire Quotes

You'd challenge me and lose. You know it, I know it, but you'd still do it. Sometimes your sense of honor confuses the hell out of me.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left.

~ Seanan Mcguire

You're nobody's rainbow. You're nobody's princess. You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Hope means you keep holding on to things that won't ever be so again.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Time resumed. Time had a way of doing that.

~ Seanan Mcguire

If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.

~ Seanan Mcguire

I really don’t think you should put your hand inside the manticore, dear. You don’t know where it’s been. —Enid Healy

~ Seanan Mcguire

In the interests of friendship, I hope you’ll forgive me what I’m about to do.”“Forgive you wha—”My sentence was cut off as he clamped his mouth over mine, kissing me deeply....“Ready to make a scene?”He raised an eyebrow. “Do I have a choice?”“Not really. To quote something someone said to me recently, in the interests of friendship, I hope you’ll forgive what I’m about to do.” I drew back my hand and slapped him across the face. The smack of flesh striking flesh echoed through the hall. Conversations stopped as people whipped around to stare at us. Raising my voice to something just below a shout, I snarled, “You asshole!

~ Seanan Mcguire

I am so tired of this gothic crap,” I muttered. “Just once, I want to meet the villain in a cheerful, brightly lit room. Possibly one with kittens.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Anyone who thinks cryptozoology is the study of the impossible has never really taken a very good look at the so-called natural world. Once you get past the megamouth sharks, naked mole rats, and spotted hyenas, then the basilisks, dragons, and cuckoos just don't seem that unreasonable. Unpleasant, yes, but unreasonable? Not really.

~ Seanan Mcguire

I think the rules where different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn't care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.

~ Seanan Mcguire

This isn't an army marching on the Mists. This isn't a case you have to solve. It's just a bunch of nobles coming to puff their chests out at each other an try to look important. Do what I do. Bring popcorn.

~ Seanan Mcguire

If it had been my decision, you would still be sleeping, and I would be hoping every hour of every night you lived was filled with the foulest of dreams.”“My only nightmare in this moment is the quality of the mattress you saw fit to place me on,” said Simon. “Really, brother, have you never heard of lumbar support?

~ Seanan Mcguire

Sometimes, when it seems like the pain is never going to end, I wish I’d gotten a different suite of magical talents from my mother. Like the power to avoid situations that end with me willingly jamming my arm into a door made entirely from animate, apparently angry rose briars.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Hey! I turned, crossing my arms and glaring. I was talking to him!Tybalt eyed me with amusement, which just made me glare harder. No, you were inciting him to stab you with a toothpick. Again, the difference is small, but I think it matters.

~ Seanan Mcguire

None of this is real, my dear. Not this house, not this conversation, not those shoes you're wearing--which are several years out of style if you're trying to reacclimatize yourself to the ways of your peers, and are not proper mourning shoes if you're trying to hold fast to your recent past--and not either one of us. 'Real' is a four-letter-word, and I'll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.

~ Seanan Mcguire

There was still something unfinished around her eyes; she wasn’t done yet. She was a story, not an epilogue. And if she chose to narrate her own life one word at a time as she descended the stairs to meet her newest arrival, that wasn’t hurting anyone. Narration was a hard habit to break, after all. Sometimes it was all a body had.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Growing up in my family meant ambushes on your birthday, crossbows for Christmas, and games of dodge ball where the balls were occasionally rigged to explode. It also meant learning how to work your way out of a wide variety of death traps. Failure to get loose on your own could lead to missing dinner, or worse, being forced to admit that you missed dinner because your baby sister had tied you to the couch. Again.

~ Seanan Mcguire

But that’s what family is, isn't it? It’s traditions and trinkets that only matter when we hold them up against the mirrors of our lives, lending them meaning, lending them weight, until they become heavy enough to endure without us. We create the past in the things that we choose to remember about it. We turn everything into stories, and those stories matter because we say that they do. It’s all a wheel, and ours are the hands that turn it.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Parthenogenesis means never having your mother tell you to stop doing that or you'll go blind.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Adversity doesn't exist to make us stronger. Adversity exists because this world is a damn hard place to live. Prove that you're better than the things it throws at you. Live.

~ Seanan Mcguire

I didn't look back. Sometimes, not looking back is the only mercy the world has left to show.

~ Seanan Mcguire

He was still so very young. Faeries—true faeries, not their changeling throwaways—live forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it’s over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He’d never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.But he didn’t. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him.

~ Seanan Mcguire

My lord was never sane, but he was my love, once. He always will be, somewhere. Wherever it is that the once upon a times go when they die.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Quentin quieted and watched her for a moment, hungrily, like he was trying to memorize every detail. Maybe he was. Forever is a long time. You have to burn the edges of memory onto your heart, or they can fade, and sometimes the second loss is worse than the first one.

~ Seanan Mcguire

I didn't even feel my face hitting the pond. Everything was darkness, glorious darkness and the final, perfect absence of pain. It was done, all of it, the running and the fighting, and the pain. After everything that I'd gone through, it was finally over, and this time, the water would carry me home.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Faeries are real. Magic is real. My tendency to greet dangerous situations by plunging in headfirst and seeing how long it takes to get myself covered head to toe in blood is also real.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.

~ Seanan Mcguire

I wondered how much time they'd spent practicing entrances like this one, smoothing away their rough edges and rendering them brief but potent expressions of effortless grace. I decided to stop thinking about it, and just be grateful that there was no circumstance, however, unlikely, that could put me in their place.

~ Seanan Mcguire

If you wish to find your answers, you’ll need to begin thinking, not merely reacting.-- Lily

~ Seanan Mcguire

We hated each other so well and loved each other so badly...

~ Seanan Mcguire

If something happened to Gillian, I'd rip the world down to save her, even if she spat in my face when I did. That's what parenthood means.

~ Seanan Mcguire

The night-haunts never lie. They could, if they wanted to, but they don’t really see the point. The truth is so much more dangerous than a lie.

~ Seanan Mcguire

He said that he was sure you would be amendable to this course of action. April paused, eyes widening, before she said indignantly, I believe he may have lied to me!

~ Seanan Mcguire

I would love a sandwich,' said Tybalt, with enough gravity to make it sound like a formal proclamation. Resolved: that we will have ham and cheese sandwiches.

~ Seanan Mcguire

You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it's better than admitting the journey's over.

~ Seanan Mcguire

I watch him go, and wonder if being good isn't its own punishment as much as it's supposed to be its own reward.

~ Seanan Mcguire

There's always time for tea.

~ Seanan Mcguire

For us, places we went were home. We didn't care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn't have to pretend to be something we weren't. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.

~ Seanan Mcguire

Doors opened everywhere. Maybe one day, the children of this world who had gone to that world to save themselves would see a door that didn't fit right with the walls around it, something with a doorknob made of a moon, or a knocker that winked. Maybe they could still go home

~ Seanan Mcguire