Top 140 Robin McKinley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent.”

— Robin McKinley

52. “There are things you don’t want to know you can do.”

— Robin McKinley

53. “Never assume. Never make plans. Keep doing the press-ups and deep knee bends: you’ll need all your strength and flexibility when your life suddenly implodes. Maybe it won’t – some people do lead enchanted lives – but odds are that it will. Some time.”

— Robin McKinley

54. “I get a little cranky with the whole business about kids not having attention spans. This reminds me of the usual business of thinking that the next generation is hopeless. Every generation has said that about every younger generation.”

— Robin McKinley

55. “Robin: I’m sure you’ve learnt to bake, but you have not learned to handle Much. The phrases that you need my lady, are “No”, “No you can’t”, and “No, get out of here before I throw something at you”.”

— Robin McKinley

56. “Tiny fists can hurt quite a lot when they hit you in the face.”

— Robin McKinley

57. “The story is always better than your ability to write it.”

— Robin McKinley

58. “I liked that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself.”

— Robin McKinley

59. “He didn’t look insane or inhuman. He did look uncooperative.”

— Robin McKinley

60. “It seems to me further, that it is very odd that fate should leave so careful a trail, and spend so little time preparing the one that must follow it.”

— Robin McKinley

61. “He wasn’t really boring. She just wasn’t in love with him.”

— Robin McKinley

62. “And if my choice is to sit graciously in my best robes and accept the inevitable or to bail a sea with a bucket, give me the bucket.”

— Robin McKinley

63. “Betrayal would be a different sort of sick.”

— Robin McKinley

64. “Lack of adaptability is the root cause of much trouble in large organizations.”

— Robin McKinley

65. “Your Chalice, Master, sees all things clearly, which is both her strength and her weakness.”

— Robin McKinley

66. “So when a dragon is directly over you, well, even if you’re me and you’re kind of used to it, your medulla oblongata is still telling you ’the sky is falling, you’re about to die, run like hell.”

— Robin McKinley

67. “I almost wish I’d had the forethought to eat a tree myself.”

— Robin McKinley

68. “Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.”

— Robin McKinley

69. “One doesn’t generally look into mirrors when one is especially angry; one has better things to do, like pace the floor or throw things.”

— Robin McKinley

70. “People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.”

— Robin McKinley

71. “Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn’t be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.”

— Robin McKinley

72. “It was too important a matter, this talking to people, and listening to them, to do it lightly or often.”

— Robin McKinley

73. “Campaigns are a great bore; they are mostly about either finding enough water for your company, or being up to your knees in mud and all the food’s gone bad. Battles are blessedly brief; but you’re sick with terror before, blind with panic during, and miserable with horror by the results, when you have to bury your friends, or listen to them scream.”

— Robin McKinley

74. “Tsornin’s nostrils showed red, but his ears were as alert as ever, and occasionally he would rub his nose gently against the nape of her neck, just in case she was momentarily not thinking about him.”

— Robin McKinley

75. “Mice are terribly chatty. They will chat about anything, and if there is nothing to chat about, they will chat about having nothing to chat about. Compared to mice, robins are reserved.”

— Robin McKinley

76. “The burden she carried was different from yours, and it had worn on her for many years. When I knew her she had forgotten joy, although I believe Arlbeth gave her a little back again.”

— Robin McKinley

77. “I – I don’t know what possessed me to tell the story tonight. I do believe the storm has crept into my head and disarranged all my thinking.”

— Robin McKinley

78. “But it was equally clear to her that this was her fate, that she had called its name and it had come to her, and she could do nothing now but own it.”

— Robin McKinley

79. “He was not tall and handsome and flashing-eyed like his older brother, but there was kindness and grace in him, and intelligence in his unremarkable brown eyes.”

— Robin McKinley

80. “And since I am the only one who sees you, why are you not then beautiful?”

— Robin McKinley

81. “Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic – which was what all magic was – it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that looked more or less the same from day to day and might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody’s knee and purred.”

— Robin McKinley

82. “One has various things in the back of one’s mind. Occasionally an opportunity presents itself to bring one forward. Most of these opportunities come to nothing. Once in a very great while one – or two – do come to something.”

— Robin McKinley

83. “Not all honey – she had concluded – had a specific use beyond what all honey is good for, sweetness and salves. But this honey, it was somehow so strong that it must be for something, though she had still not learnt what it was. The best she had come to was that this honey was for joy...”

— Robin McKinley

84. “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m here and I’m listening; and there is still joy in this world.”

— Robin McKinley

85. “She had courage enough, but little imagination; or she would not have forgotten joy, whatever the weight on her.”

— Robin McKinley

86. “So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town – the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them – and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love.”

— Robin McKinley

87. “What I write, if you have to label it, is crossover, and I think that much of the stuff that is called children’s or YA is in fact crossover and is equally valid for anyone who likes to read fantasy.”

— Robin McKinley

88. “The rich smell of the rose was almost visible; I fancied it lent a rosy edge to the shadows cast by the firelight.”

— Robin McKinley

89. “I disliked promises on principle because my conscience made me keep them.”

— Robin McKinley

90. “It’s hard to look too grand when you’re led by someone who looks like a pudding with legs.”

— Robin McKinley

91. “It doesn’t matter if I’m only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months’ supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham’s story “The Book-Bag.”

— Robin McKinley

92. “She had always been the least of the sisters, called Beauty because she had no other, better characteristic to name her as herself.”

— Robin McKinley

93. “I’ve always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.”

— Robin McKinley

94. “Muffin cups in my bakery were real sorcerer’s apprentice material, like the dough for the cinnamon rolls every morning could have stood in for The Blob.”

— Robin McKinley

95. “Nothing?′ said Corlath. ‘I said there were two things. I have told you the first. You told us what you saw as you saw it. But this is the second thing: you spoke in the Old Tongue, what we call the Language of the Gods, that none knows any more but kings and sorcerers, and those they wish to teach it to. The language I just spoke to you, that you did not recognize- I was repeating the words you had said yourself, a moment before.”

— Robin McKinley

96. “Mathin said: “It is best to take your opponent’s sash. The kysin mark each blow dealt, but to cut off the other rider’s sash is best. This you will do.” “Oh,” said Harry. “You may, if you wish, unhorse him first,” Mathin added as an afterthought. “Thanks,” said Harry.”

— Robin McKinley

97. “One of the things she’d learnt on her own, ragged, bemused, zigzag way was that the best sources of useful information were often in strange places...”

— Robin McKinley

98. “Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for...”

— Robin McKinley

99. “They could at least part with love. It was like Tor to make the gesture; her father, for all his kindness, was too proud – or too much a king; and she was too proud, or too bitter, or too young.”

— Robin McKinley

100. “Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.”

— Robin McKinley