Top 140 Robin McKinley Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Post-traumatic shock, phooey. Seemed to me the trauma was trotting right along with me, like a dog on a leash with its owner. I was the dog. I.”

— Robin McKinley

102. “My books happen. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl ‘Write me! Write me now!’ But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again. And so I spend a lot of time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying ‘Wait for me! Wait for me!’ and waving my notebook in the air.”

— Robin McKinley

103. “I wondered what you’d have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?”

— Robin McKinley

104. “What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task.”

— Robin McKinley

105. “Stop it. This is me, remember? We’ve been thrown up by the same puppies. – Ossin.”

— Robin McKinley

106. “It was one of the good things about him. Whatever he might not be telling you, what he did tell you was the truth.”

— Robin McKinley

107. “Reread your favorite novel, the one you only let yourself read any more when you’re sick in bed.”

— Robin McKinley

108. “He cannot be so bad if he loves roses so much.”

— Robin McKinley

109. “Despair was a private weakness she could not afford to indulge.”

— Robin McKinley

110. “Aunt and Katriona kept a few chickens, but the only other domestic animal they had – if either “domestic” or “had” was applicable – was Flinx, their not-a-house-cat. He was presently a fat tortoiseshell puddle sprawled in the sunlight a few rows over. Since he was only crushing a few nonessential greens, which would regrow anyway, they let him be.”

— Robin McKinley

111. “Nobody tried to follow me when I left the coffeehouse at ten, or at least nobody but some of the overweight so-called wildlife that hangs around the pedestrian precinct and tries to cadge handouts from the weak-willed. They know a white bakery bag when they see one, and I was carrying a dozen cinnamon rolls. I swear some of our sparrows are too fat to fly, but the feral cats are too fat to catch them. And the squirrels should have had teeny-weeny skateboards to keep their bellies off the ground.”

— Robin McKinley

112. “When you write your first novel you don’t really know what you’re doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first ‘Once upon a time’. I’m not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.”

— Robin McKinley

113. “Tales are as much the necessary fabric of our lives as our bodies are.”

— Robin McKinley

114. “What was new was the fact that, despite my heart doing its fight-or-flight, help-we’re-prey-and-HEY-STUPID-THAT’S-A-VAMPIRE number, I was glad to see him. Ridiculous but true. Scary but true.”

— Robin McKinley

115. “He grunted; she recognized it as relief that she wasn’t going to nag him further about Tor the Just, who probably wasn’t that boring if he could hold off the Notherners for nine days and melt a hole in the hills.”

— Robin McKinley

116. “I didn’t want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad.”

— Robin McKinley

117. “This place felt like home; not her home perhaps, but someone’s home, accustomed to shelter and keep and befriend its master.”

— Robin McKinley

118. “He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.”

— Robin McKinley

119. “The king will catch us if the sheriff should fail to and then the Saxon race can be symbolically and romantically hung by the neck till dead.”

— Robin McKinley

120. “And none at all has ridden at the king’s side since Aerinha, goddess of honor and flame, first taught men to forge their blades. You’d think Aerinha would have had better sense.”

— Robin McKinley

121. “I long for another human face just as I fear it.”

— Robin McKinley

122. “I loved every one of these people. And I couldn’t take another minute of their company.”

— Robin McKinley

123. “It was daylight. I wondered dispassionately if I might be getting a sunburn, but I rarely burned anyway, and the idea in the present state of affairs, like worrying about a hangnail while you are being chased by an axe murderer, seemed so ludicrous I couldn’t be bothered.”

— Robin McKinley

124. “He laughed, tried to make it into a cough, inhaled at exactly the wrong moment, and then really did cough.”

— Robin McKinley

125. “I give you a small serenity.”

— Robin McKinley

126. “It was blissful, spending time with someone who would leave you alone. I loved him for it. And I was happy to repay in kind. It had never occurred to me that leaving someone alone could harden into a habit that could become a barrier.”

— Robin McKinley

127. “I like to assume that since I drive a car and maintain a respectable credit rating and rarely murder anyone and bury them in the back garden unless they really deserve it, that the fact that I hear voices wont unduly disturb anyone.”

— Robin McKinley

128. “There were some things that took life and broke it, not merely into meaninglessness, but with active malice flung the pieces farther, into hell.”

— Robin McKinley

129. “She was ashamed. She would not – she would not – be frightened of him: he was what he was, and he had made a promise he would keep.”

— Robin McKinley

130. “There was a long pause while she hated everyone impartially: Tor for behaving like a farmer’s son whose pet chicken has just been insulted; her father, for being so immovably kingly; and Perlith for being Perlith.”

— Robin McKinley

131. “How does a hundred-and-eighty-pound man turn into a ninety-pound wolf? Where does the leftover ninety go? Does he park it in the umbrella stand overnight?”

— Robin McKinley

132. “It wasn’t the work of the Chalice she minded. It was the vast unfathomable burden of its responsibility. She still felt the Chalice was incomprehensibly beyond her – even wished that it were incomprehensibly beyond her, so she could give up.”

— Robin McKinley

133. “Mr. Responsible Media was looking rebellious, but this was my country. I was the Cinnamon Roll Queen and most of those assembled were my devoted subjects.”

— Robin McKinley

134. “We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses.”

— Robin McKinley

135. “He was a vampire. I was a human. We weren’t supposed to have any bonds between us, except straightforward generic ones of murderous antagonism and so on.”

— Robin McKinley

136. “Water – plain water from the Ladywell – and a spoonful of honey, Master.” She was sure – she was almost sure – she did not imagine it that he smiled. And it was only after her answer that she felt him begin to draw the cup toward himself. Still he did not – or could not – bear its weight, and so she carried it for him. Together they made only a faint gesture of holding it above his head, for the audience to see; and then she tipped it gently against his mouth, and saw him drink.”

— Robin McKinley

137. “Her words flew like butterflies through the vibrant air of the hall; and the company was quiet, as if watching them.”

— Robin McKinley

138. “Rosie hated her curly golden hair. When she was old enough to hold minimal conversations, the itsy-bitsy-cutesycoo sort of grown-ups would pull the soft ringlets gently and tell her what a pretty little girl she was. She would stare at this sort of grown-up and say, “I am not pretty. I am intelligent. And brave.”

— Robin McKinley

139. “A writer who isn’t writing isn’t really alive.”

— Robin McKinley

140. “But the worst borne is not necessarily past and over with thereby. The worst of fighting a dragon is being caught in its fire, but you do not survive dragon encounters by commanding your muscles to withstand dragon fire, because you and they cannot. You survive by avoiding being burnt.”

— Robin McKinley

141. “The thing that tells me when one of the pictures in my head or phrases in my ear is a story, and not a mere afternoon’s distraction, is its life, its strength, its vitality. If you were picking up stones in the dark, you would know when you picked up a puppy instead. It’s warm; it wriggles; it’s alive.”

— Robin McKinley

142. “When spring came I dug up the garden and planted it, and weeded it, and prayed over it, and fidgeted; and almost three years of lying fallow had agreed with it, because it produced radishes the size of onions, potatoes the size of melons, and melons the size of small sheep. The herb border ran wild, and the air smelled wonderful.”

— Robin McKinley