Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Hope only got you hurt. Hope was her least favourite thing, of all the things.”

— Seanan McGuire

452. “The habit of narration, of crafting something miraculous out of the commonplace, was hard to break... Narrate the impossible things, turn them into a story, and they could be controlled...”

— Seanan McGuire

453. “These days, everyone wants to eat, but no one wants to take the time and care needed to coax the land into giving up its glories. People don’t change. We’re always selfish, and we’re always hungry. We’ve just gotten better at looking at greed and saying ‘Oh, that’s self-interest, that’s all right.’ We’ve forgotten the way the word ‘enough’ feels on the tongue.”

— Seanan McGuire

454. “Parents lied to children when they thought it was necessary, or when they thought that it would somehow make things better. It only made sense that children should lie to parents in the same way.”

— Seanan McGuire

455. “Hearts are resilient. They can heal over and over again. That’s the good part. The bad part is that having a resilient heart means it can be broken so many times that it feels like it should never recover, like it should be nothing but a pile of shards in my chest.”

— Seanan McGuire

456. “Adversity doesn’t exist to make us stronger. Adversity exists because this world is a damn hard place to live. Prove that you’re better than the things it throws at you. Live.”

— Seanan McGuire

457. “But children, ah, children. Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home.”

— Seanan McGuire

458. “It used to be all black, like my mother’s. When I danced with the Lord of the Dead for the first time, he said it was beautiful, and he ran his fingers though it. All the hair turned white around them, out of jealousy. That’s why I only have five black streaks left. Those are the parts he touched.”

— Seanan McGuire

459. “I’m a lot of things, but rational where the people I love are concerned has never been one of them.”

— Seanan McGuire

460. “Sadly, as I had come to learn, sometimes being a pincushion is my purpose in life.”

— Seanan McGuire

461. “Through the words on the page she followed Alice down rabbit holes and Dorothy into tornados, solved mysteries alongside Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew, flew with Peter to Neverland, and made a wonderful journey to a Mushroom Planet. Her family was reasonably well-off, and there was no shortage of books, either through the shops or the library, which seemed to be entirely without limits.”

— Seanan McGuire

462. “If monarchs are that much against being overthrown, they shouldn’t do things that would make it seem like a good idea.”

— Seanan McGuire

463. “How quickly they grow apart, when there is something to be superior about.”

— Seanan McGuire

464. “We’ve much to do, and time does insist on being linear here, because it’s awful.”

— Seanan McGuire

465. “As always, my alarm went off too early, yanking me back into a world I wasn’t quite prepared to deal with. I looked automatically toward the window as I sat up. Only three bloody crescents marked the spots where bluebirds had managed to slam themselves to death against the glass.”

— Seanan McGuire

466. “She had thought to pay for a lifetime. Now, it seemed, she might pay for a life instead.”

— Seanan McGuire

467. “Painters and sculptors and designers, they take raw materials and turn them into art. Dancers turn themselves into art. We are poetry in motion.”

— Seanan McGuire

468. “At least someone was having a good day. Of course, the cats would have a good time in nuclear winter, as long as somebody was left to feed them.”

— Seanan McGuire

469. “His claws, draped in velvet and wrapped in affectation, are sharp enough to slaughter the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

470. “But that’s what family is, isn’t it? It’s traditions and trinkets that only matter when we hold them up against the mirrors of our lives, lending them meaning, lending them weight, until they become heavy enough to endure without us. We create the past in the things that we choose to remember about it. We turn everything into stories, and those stories matter because we say that they do. It’s all a wheel, and ours are the hands that turn it.”

— Seanan McGuire

471. “Someone with sharp enough eyes might see the instant where one wounded heart begins to rot while the other starts to heal.”

— Seanan McGuire

472. “Reality, it must sadly be said, has a way of complicating things, even things we might believe could never be that complicated.”

— Seanan McGuire

473. “But Dr. Bleak said that conducting psychological experiments on the neighbors never ended well, and he was in charge, so Jack kept her thoughts to herself.”

— Seanan McGuire

474. “In that moment, Roger is sure – absolutely certain – of two things: Dodger is real, and he wants her to be his friend.”

— Seanan McGuire

475. “What is wrong? Is this related to the notice I received from Queen Windermere that a war was being beta-tested, and might be cleared for release? I do not have time to allow my coders to be slaughtered. It seems very inefficient.”

— Seanan McGuire

476. “Whatever it was, it was the size of a cow, and looked like what you’d get if you somehow managed to cross a beaver and a crocodile, looked at the results, and decided what your new monster really needed was a bunch of extra teeth.”

— Seanan McGuire

477. “The laws of magic, like the laws of nature, are not always as balanced as they might seem.”

— Seanan McGuire

478. “If anyone was going to get themselves murdered to guarantee they would remain the center of attention, it would be him.”

— Seanan McGuire

479. “Yes, that’s a brilliant idea. Choose the career path most likely to lead to an early, painful death, and you’re sure to find job satisfaction.”

— Seanan McGuire

480. “Alex would make a terrible Martian,” said Sarah. “He doesn’t have a giant laser and he’s not planning an Earth-shattering kaboom.”

— Seanan McGuire

481. “Faeries are real. Magic is real. My tendency to greet dangerous situations by plunging in headfirst and seeing how long it takes to get myself covered head to toe in blood is also real.”

— Seanan McGuire

482. “She was a bitter, resentful, maladjusted kid who grew into an equally maladjusted teenager; it was only natural that we’d become friends the day we met.”

— Seanan McGuire

483. “Sloane’s laugh was brief and brittle, like ice breaking in an enchanted forest.”

— Seanan McGuire

484. “Nameless McBitchypants.”

— Seanan McGuire

485. “Just thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve managed to wind up covered in blood,” I said. “It’s like a new trend. A blood-free trend.”

— Seanan McGuire

486. “I kissed her like she was my Annabel Lee, and in some ways, in some places in my heart, I think that I’m kissing her still.”

— Seanan McGuire

487. “Was there a plan here, apart from ‘let’s all go to the meadow and get turned into confetti by the sheep’?”

— Seanan McGuire

488. “The mind is an imperfect engine, and it does what it will with the information it receives.”

— Seanan McGuire

489. “That was sort of like being in someone else’s nightmare, only no one was naked and there were no lobsters on the walls.”

— Seanan McGuire

490. “Sometimes I envy kids for the way they dismiss the things that don’t matter. They still get bogged down in details, but at least they’re different details.”

— Seanan McGuire

491. “That’s because the worlds we experienced barely seemed to match up, despite being the same place.”

— Seanan McGuire

492. “Don’t let anyone tell you, ever, that this is a zero-sum game. Your genius does not threaten me. It delights and inspires me.”

— Seanan McGuire

493. “Just because something was unfamiliar, that didn’t mean it had sharper teeth or crueler claws than the monster they already knew.”

— Seanan McGuire

494. “Faerie: where it’s only a little weird to realize that my boyfriend is older than the internal combustion engine.”

— Seanan McGuire

495. “She didn’t seem to understand that this was strange, that when the rest of them looked at the junkyard, they saw only failures, not the building blocks of new successes. This wasn’t their place. There was no question that it was hers.”

— Seanan McGuire

496. “There’s a reason you were all pulled into worlds that suited you so well. Imagine, for a moment, if you’d fallen into the world described by your neighbor instead.”

— Seanan McGuire

497. “He was a hero once, and it’s the nature of heroes to throw themselves headlong into impossible odds, believing that somehow they’ll come through them alive. The problem is that it’s also in the nature of heroes to die, and I had no way of being sure that Sylvester didn’t plan to do exactly that. I should know how heroes are. Somewhere along the way, I became one.”

— Seanan McGuire

498. “My hair is hungry,” announced Carol. That brought the conversation to its second screeching halt in as many minutes, as everyone turned to stare at the gorgon.”

— Seanan McGuire

499. “Not dying at all would have been better – way better – but I guess I always knew that we couldn’t win forever. That’s not how the universe works. Sooner or later everyone has to lose. Even the good guys.”

— Seanan McGuire

500. “You’re like a horoscope in horticulture.”

— Seanan McGuire