Top 140 Robin McKinley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don’t want to be a writer unless you have no choice – and if you have no choice, good luck to you.”

— Robin McKinley

2. “For anyone who is: just keep writing. Keep reading. If you are meant to be a writer, a storyteller, it’ll work itself out. You just keep feeding it your energy, and giving it that crucial chance to work itself out. By reading and writing.”

— Robin McKinley

3. “When they finished laughing they were on their way to being not just friends, but the dearest of friends, the sort of friends whose lives are shaped by the friendship.”

— Robin McKinley

4. “Sometimes it is better not to know. Sometimes when you do know you just fold up.”

— Robin McKinley

5. “Because she was a princess she had a pegasus.”

— Robin McKinley

6. “Perhaps it is a human thing, to look upon such beauty and fail to encompass it.”

— Robin McKinley

7. “The insides of our own minds are the scariest things there are.”

— Robin McKinley

8. “Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.”

— Robin McKinley

9. “I feel like a potato that’s recently been mashed,“she said.”

— Robin McKinley

10. “As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to.”

— Robin McKinley

11. “I love you. I will love you till the stars crumble, which is a less idle threat than is usual to lovers on parting.”

— Robin McKinley

12. “With the knowledge of her aloneness came a rush of self-declaration: I will not be nothing.”

— Robin McKinley

13. “I’m your friend, Sunshine,” he said. “Everything else is just static on the line.”

— Robin McKinley

14. “Stay a little while longer, and let everyone congratulate you – including the ones who clearly don’t want to: in fact, especially the ones who clearly don’t want to. You don’t have to say anything but ’thank you.”

— Robin McKinley

15. “The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose.”

— Robin McKinley

16. “Write what you want to read. The person you know best in this world is you. Listen to yourself. If you are excited by what you are writing, you have a much better chance of putting that excitement over to a reader.”

— Robin McKinley

17. “My capacity for invention is flash hot stark, I thought. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras. Pity about the rest of me.”

— Robin McKinley

18. “One keeps searching for ease, she did not say, and not finding it, till the memories of no-pain seem only like daydreams.”

— Robin McKinley

19. “It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog’s love, once given, is not reconsidered; it just is, like sunlight or mountains. It is for human beings to see the shadows behind the light, and the light behind the shadows. It is, perhaps, why dogs have people, and people have dogs.”

— Robin McKinley

20. “Feeling at peace, however fragilely, made it easy to slip into the visionary end of the dark-sight. The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose.”

— Robin McKinley

21. “Tell me who you are. You need not tell me your name. Names have power, even human ones. Tell me where you live and what you do with your living.”

— Robin McKinley

22. “Friends you will have need of, for in you two worlds meet. There is no one on both sides with you, so you must learn to take your own counsel; and not to fear what is strange, if you know it also to be true. – Luthe.”

— Robin McKinley

23. “The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you’ve done a story justice, you’re in the wrong business.”

— Robin McKinley

24. “Then marry me. For I love you, and I do not believe there is anything so wrong with you. You are fair in my eyes and you lie fair on my heart.”

— Robin McKinley

25. “Golden arrow? And what would we do with a golden arrow? Give it to Alan for a lute string? I could hang it around my neck on a chain, perhaps, and let it stab me in the ribs when I tried to sit.”

— Robin McKinley

26. “The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?”

— Robin McKinley

27. “You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.”

— Robin McKinley

28. “The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you’re fussing that he’s tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.”

— Robin McKinley

29. “Can’t all beasts be tamed?”

— Robin McKinley

30. “Little John, watching her standing next to her brother, half-glowering in the old Cecil manner and half-comforted by Robin’s words, saw for a moment what it had been like for her as Will’s litter sister. Some of what she was good at, and some of what she was bad at, as his pupil, came clear to him in that moment; and something else came clear to him too, but he set it aside so quickly that he allowed himself not to recognize it for what it was.”

— Robin McKinley

31. “The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them ‘magic’ or ‘dragons’ or ‘faeries’ and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I’m prejudiced.”

— Robin McKinley

32. “I’m real, too. I just don’t know, real what.”

— Robin McKinley

33. “If you try to breathe water, you will not turn into a fish, you will drown; but water is still good to drink.”

— Robin McKinley

34. “Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you. Can I trust him? What do I have to lose?”

— Robin McKinley

35. “He will apologize, or I’ll give him a lesson in swordplay he will not like at all.”

— Robin McKinley

36. “But the world turns, and even legends change; and somewhere there is a border, and sometime, perhaps, someone will decide to cross it, however well guarded its thorns may be.”

— Robin McKinley

37. “All you did was sit there, he said. Why are you so tired? I sat very diligently, she said.”

— Robin McKinley

38. “If you wish, I shall go personally to your City and knock together the heads of Perlith and Galooney.”

— Robin McKinley

39. “She fell asleep, leaning on his chest, and he edged her a little off a particularly painful bruise, leaned his head back against the tree he had propped them up against, and closed his own eyes.”

— Robin McKinley

40. “Dogs are very comforting when your world has exploded.”

— Robin McKinley

41. “She fell in love with him, and he with her; that’s a spell if you like.”

— Robin McKinley

42. “There had been certain romantic interludes in the past that had included galloping across the desert at night; but he had never abducted any woman whose enthusiastic support for such a plan had not been secured well in advance.”

— Robin McKinley

43. “Narknon put a paw on Harry’s chest and began licking her face; a hunting-cat’s tongue is much harsher than a housecat’s. Harry thought her skin would crumble and peel off, but she didn’t have the strength to push her away.”

— Robin McKinley

44. “Vampire. Dangerous. Unknowable. Seriously creepy. This one’s name was Constantine. We’d met before.”

— Robin McKinley

45. “It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog’s love, once given, is not reconsidered.”

— Robin McKinley

46. “She thought, I need no cup. I am Chalice. I am filling with the grief and hurt and fear of my demesne; the shattered earthlines weigh me down; I am brimming with the needs of my people.”

— Robin McKinley

47. “I don’t differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children’s or YA stories particularly.”

— Robin McKinley

48. “What was she to say? “The prodigal has returned? The mutineer wishes to be reinstated? The subordinate, having gone to a great deal of trouble to prove her commander wrong, has come back and promises to be a good little subordinate hereafter, or at least until next time?”

— Robin McKinley

49. “Sungold blew impatiently and began to dig a hole with one foot. She booted his elbow with her toe and he stopped, but after a moment he lowered his head and blew again, harder, and she could feel him shifting his weight, considering if she might let him dig just a small hole.”

— Robin McKinley

50. “Say yes, babe, or I’ll spill you off over the Wall next time – got it?”

— Robin McKinley