Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Blood is thicker than water, but family isn’t just about blood. Family is about faith, and loyalty, and who you love. If you don’t have those things, I don’t care what the blood says. You’re not family.”

— Seanan McGuire

2. “Sometimes, even the strongest people get tired.”

— Seanan McGuire

3. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. – Richard Feynman.”

— Seanan McGuire

4. “Try your best. That’s always been good enough for the people who love you.”

— Seanan McGuire

5. “There’s no such thing as fighting dirty. There’s fighting like you want to live, and fighting like you want to die. If you’ve got anything to live for – anything at all – I suggest you try the first way. The people you love will thank you for it. – Alice Healy.”

— Seanan McGuire

6. “Sometimes monsters are made, not born.”

— Seanan McGuire

7. “Being smart isn’t good enough. You need to be educated, and you need to be open-minded, and you need to remember that what you don’t know can most definitely hurt you.”

— Seanan McGuire

8. “Change sucks. No one’s going to argue about that. Change is hard and painful and sometimes we wind up losing things we wanted to keep forever.”

— Seanan McGuire

9. “We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

— Seanan McGuire

10. “It’s not that I hate my job. It’s that I hate the people I have to do it with.”

— Seanan McGuire

11. “There’s always more than one way to find something out. People only say there’s only one way when they want an excuse to do something incredibly stupid without getting called on it.”

— Seanan McGuire

12. “We can’t save them if they don’t want to be saved. It doesn’t work that way.”

— Seanan McGuire

13. “Be sure you include a gift card for Tim Hortons,” he said. “That’s how we say ‘sorry for killing your firstborn son’ in Canada.”

— Seanan McGuire

14. “Ignorance can be corrected. Arrogance is a harder key to turn.”

— Seanan McGuire

15. “We need a plan.” “Don’t die,” suggested Ryan. “We need a better plan.”

— Seanan McGuire

16. “That’s the nice thing about insanity: evil people kill you, but crazy ones try to make you understand.”

— Seanan McGuire

17. “Now I know that if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong.”

— Seanan McGuire

18. “If you find something you truly love, stick with it. There’s nothing else in this world that will make you half as happy. There’s nothing else that will make you half as miserable, either, but you can’t have one without the other.”

— Seanan McGuire

19. “Sometimes romance is of less importance than the feeling of being absolutely safe: of knowing that nothing and no one can hurt you, because the person who loves you most in all the world will destroy them if they try.”

— Seanan McGuire

20. “Family” really means “the ones that can hurt you the most.”

— Seanan McGuire

21. “It’s better to act than it is to react. Acting gets you in trouble. Reacting all too frequently gets you dead.”

— Seanan McGuire

22. “The world doesn’t stop spinning because you’re sad, and that’s good; if it did, people would go around breaking hearts like they were sheets of maple sugar, just to keep the world exactly where it is. They’d make it out like it was a good thing, a few crying children in exchange for a peace that never falters or fades. We can be sad and we can be hurt and we can even be killed, but the world keeps turning, and the things we’re supposed to do keep needing to be done.”

— Seanan McGuire

23. “When Rome burned, the emperor’s cats still expected to be fed on time.”

— Seanan McGuire

24. “Color is a kind of magic. He hopes people who have it understand that, and don’t take it for granted.”

— Seanan McGuire

25. “Playing fair is for people who don’t mind playing to lose.”

— Seanan McGuire

26. “Walking into danger with your eyes open and your mind clear is a sign of bravery, not foolishness. Well, sometimes foolishness. But as long as you walk back out again, you can pretend that part doesn’t matter.”

— Seanan McGuire

27. “Give ten children a toy box, and watch them select ten different toys, regardless of gender or religion or parental expectations. Children have preferences. The danger comes when they, as with any human, are denied those preferences for too long.”

— Seanan McGuire

28. “The trick is not learning to disappear. The trick is learning to hide in plain sight, until everyone around you swears you belong exactly where you are.”

— Seanan McGuire

29. “People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical.”

— Seanan McGuire

30. “Grave robbing was still viewed as socially inappropriate, and doing it when the sun was up was generally viewed as unwise.”

— Seanan McGuire

31. “Language is an invasive species. Let it take root in new soil, and you’ll never beat it out, no matter how hard you try.”

— Seanan McGuire

32. “Love isn’t always a good thing. Love can be dangerous: toxic and corrosive and cruel. People act like love is one of the great positives of the universe, but those people usually haven’t seen love in the process of eating its prey alive. Love doesn’t let go, and love doesn’t forgive. Hate is worse, on the whole, but that doesn’t make love inherently kind. Nothing could.”

— Seanan McGuire

33. “Only an idiot would trust a Kelpie this close to the water. Getting on its back with the scent of the sea in the air would be a fast, painful means of suicide, and I’m not a fan of pain.”

— Seanan McGuire

34. “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

35. “Respect is rarely the thing that gets you killed.”

— Seanan McGuire

36. “In aeternum felicitas vindactio. Defending happily ever after.”

— Seanan McGuire

37. “Destiny, noun: 1. The inevitable or irresistible course of events. 2. The inescapable future. 3. See also “screwed.”

— Seanan McGuire

38. “Evening was my worst friend and my best enemy, and she never really knew me, because even in the end, she didn’t understand that I would’ve done it without the curse.”

— Seanan McGuire

39. “Was there a reason for shoving the gummy bears off the counter? Did they tell you they were suicidal? On second thought,” I raised a hand, palm out, “don’t answer that. If the candy is talking, I don’t want to know.”

— Seanan McGuire

40. “Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important. That’s what makes them hurt so much.”

— Seanan McGuire

41. “I might regret my promises, but I keep them.”

— Seanan McGuire

42. “Sometimes it’s convenient to have a pet that no one believes in. I’d never be allowed to bring a cat to work every day, but since Crow “isn’t real,” no one’s ever reported him to the zoo management. Other times, I think it would be nice to stop hiding him from the world. Miniature griffins could be the next big trend in exotic pets.”

— Seanan McGuire

43. “Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

44. “This was the sort of situation that called for a certain amount of terror.”

— Seanan McGuire

45. “Heroes never listen. That’s why they’re heroes.”

— Seanan McGuire

46. “He liked the excuse to talk to people about their shared differences, which became their shared similarities when held up to the right light. They had all survived something. The fact that they had survived different somethings didn’t change the fact that they would always be, in certain ways, the same.”

— Seanan McGuire

47. “Love doesn’t care what you want. Love doesn’t care if it’s convenient. Love pursues its own agenda, and there’s no bullet in the world that can take it down. More’s the pity.”

— Seanan McGuire

48. “This is a terrible, horrible, incredibly foolish idea. Let’s try it and see what happens.”

— Seanan McGuire

49. “I spent enough time very bitter indeed to understand that clinging to joy when I find it is the most essential thing in the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

50. “It was easier than I expected, maybe because I was too angry and too afraid to really pay attention to what I was doing. Things are always easy when you refuse to let yourself remember how dangerous they are.”

— Seanan McGuire