Top 70 Patricia A. McKillip Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The man was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

2. “Night is not something to endure until dawn. It is an element, like wind or fire. Darkness is its own kingdom; it moves to its own laws, and many living things dwell in it.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

3. “The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

Featured in: Reading Quotes

4. “Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

5. “Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

6. “Then you will have to trust me. Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope, trust me.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

7. “Imagination is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can’t be transformed into food for the imagination.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

8. “All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

9. “Every moment is like a wheel with a hundred spokes in it. We ride always at the hub of the wheel and go forward as it turns. We ignore the array of other moments constantly turning around us. We are surrounded by doorways; we never open them.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

10. “I write fantasy because it’s there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

11. “Peace, tremulous, unexpected, sent a taproot out of nowhere into Morgan’s heart.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

12. “I do not want to choose which one of you I must love or hate. Here, I am free to do neither. I want no part of your bitterness.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

13. “Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere between earwigs and toe mold.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

14. “Wisdom never learned silence, and it is most annoying when least wanted.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

15. “But even in the schoolyard I’d been aware of that silence, that reserve in him, as though he’d been raised by foxes and language was his second language.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

16. “Love and anger are like land and sea: They meet at many different places.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

17. “It’s an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

18. “I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

19. “She is our moon. Our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl’s eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

20. “The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

21. “I heard you. Sometimes, in silence, at night, I hear the voices of things beyond eyesight, like echoes of ancient songs. I heard your voice, lonely in my dreams – it woke me, so I came. You see, I know how it is when you speak a name into an empty room with no one on earth to answer to it.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

22. “That’s the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

23. “I wish you were small again, so I could hold you in my arms and comfort you. But you are grown, and you know that for some things there is no comfort.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

24. “It was no warning, no judgment, simply her name, and she could have wept at the recognition of it.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

25. “When you choose a man who thinks eight seconds is a long time, perhaps you need two of them. Hmm?”

— Patricia A. McKillip

26. “Here in Raine, I can walk with the sunlight on my face. I can speak to anyone who speaks to me. I can learn my daughter’s language. I can be called the name I was given when I was born. Here I am no longer my own secret. Will you let me stay?”

— Patricia A. McKillip

27. “I need you to forgive me. And then perhaps I can begin to forgive myself. There is no one but you who can do that either.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

28. “I did not know, until then, that you could disappear into someone’s gaze, that bone and heart and breath could melt like shadow into light, until only light was left.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

29. “Watching the day slowly bloom into night. That’s how it always seemed to me: not the fading of a withered flower, but the opening of some dark, rich blossom, with unexpected hues and heavy scents.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

30. “When you open your mind and hands and heart to the knowing of a thing, there is no room in you for fear.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

31. “Be patient, as you must always be patient with new pale seeds buried in the dark ground. When you are stronger, you can begin to think again. But now is the time to feel.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

32. “Only yesterday a young woman came to me wanting a trap set for a man with a sweet smile and lithe arms. She was a fool, not for wanting him, but for wanting more of him than that.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

33. “Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

34. “He had made tiny pipes of feathers he had found along the streets; birds answered him here as they had in the hinterlands. A night-bird, singing back to his playing, showed him the loose bar in the iron fence, the furrowed earth along which the bar swung sideways, that told him, as the bird did, that others came here secretly. Around him, the sleeping city dreamed, tossed fretfully, muttered, dreamed again.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

35. “Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

36. “I would be mute, beautiful, changless as the earth for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King’s white house. I would do that for you and no other man inthe relm. But it would be a lie and I will do anything but lie to you – I swear that.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

37. “It’s so hard to think in winter. The world seems confined in the space of your heart; you can’t see beyond yourself.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

38. “What a dull place the world would be if all the mysteries in it were solved.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

39. “Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

40. “But you must stop playing among his ghosts – it’s stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He’s trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It’s not nice, and it’s not fair.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

41. “She spread her hands. That morning they had been soft as feathers, jeweled, polished, and perfumed. Now they were crisscrossed with blood and dirt, wearing only bruises for jewels.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

42. “You can weave your life so long – only so long, and then a thing in the world out of your control will tug at one vital thread and leave you patternless and subdued.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

43. “You – cannot ever be certain of those you love – that they will not hurt you, even loving you. But to make me certain to love you, will be to take away any love I might give you freely.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

44. “I don’t teach lies, but I do not teach all I know is true.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

45. “Men see what they are most afraid of.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

46. “In sixteen years since then, she had changed beyond recognition, and he had not changed by a moment, being the same dispassionate, thin-haired wraith who had picked her up with his bony hands and tucked her into a book bag to add to the acquisitions of the royal library.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

47. “Oh, yes.” He felt the pearls brush down his face again. Dory turned: he met her eyes and let her see the new pearls forming. “Anything that beautiful is terrible. Because it’s outside of you. It’s not you. You’ll do anything to make it part of you. You’d eat it, drown in it, kill it, let it kill you. Anything to stop it from not being you.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

48. “Faey lived, for those who knew how to find her, within Ombria’s past. Parts of the city’s past lay within time’s reach, beneath the streets in great old limestone tunnels: the hovels and mansions and sunken river that Ombria shrugged off like a forgotten skin, and buried beneath itself through the centuries.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

49. “Sorry, he said penitently. It’s a book. I have no common sense around them.”

— Patricia A. McKillip

50. “Her eyes filled with light, like sea-polished amber, and his throat constricted suddenly, too full of words.”

— Patricia A. McKillip