Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “The part of me that actually cares about being a decent person promptly punched my inner researcher in the jaw and stuffed her in a closet at the back of my head, to be retrieved later.”

— 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. “It didn’t take long to write up our reports, since they mostly consisted of variations on “Rapunzel confirmed downtown, field team dispatched to resolve the incursion; incursion resolved when Agent Winters shouted at it until it agreed to go away. Resolution mechanism not recommended for future incursions.” Demi’s was even shorter: “Barely made it out of the car.”

— Seanan McGuire

454. “Sometimes heroism is pressing on when the ending is already preordained.”

— Seanan McGuire

455. “If you don’t mind, I need to fall down until my head stops hurting.” “Of.”

— Seanan McGuire

456. “Valerie didn’t have those problems. Valerie was just another dancer, and anything she needed to hide would be mundane and understandable. Sometimes I envied Valerie, even though I knew that her life was simple only because she didn’t actually exist. Maybe that was always the secret to a simple life. Reality was the complicating factor.”

— Seanan McGuire

457. “Just so you know, I had already decided I was adopting you and taking you home to meet the rest of the family. I really, really hope you wanted siblings, because you now have two sisters, a brother, a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law, and assorted cousins, aunts, uncles, and other such familial detritus.” James looked back to me, blinking in slow bewilderment. “Ah,” he said finally. “I suppose I’ll have a busy Christmas.”

— Seanan McGuire

458. “I could give you children,” said Jack, sounding faintly affronted. “You’d have to tell me how many heads you wanted them to have, and what species you’d like them to be, but what’s the point of having all these graveyards if I can’t give you children when you ask for them?”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

460. “So please, can we go and tell her to stop? I need to exist. It’s important.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

462. “I mean, how many people have jobs where they can say “I didn’t sleep last night because the mice wouldn’t stop talking” and get sympathy rather than a referral to a psychiatrist?”

— Seanan McGuire

463. “Hummingbird girl, running on caffeine and borrowed energy. He’s seen what happens when that energy runs out. He never wants to see it again.”

— Seanan McGuire

464. “Flirting was safe, flirting was fun; flirting was a way of interacting with her peers without anyone realizing that there was anything strange about her. She could have flirted forever. It was just the things that came after flirting that she had no interest in.”

— Seanan McGuire

465. “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

466. “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

467. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s because you spent so long lost that you must insist on bringing every lost thing home.”

— Seanan McGuire

468. “Truly, you are as generous as you are violent.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

470. “The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

472. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

475. “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

476. “You lost a great deal of blood.” “I didn’t lose it,” I said. “I know exactly where it is.”

— Seanan McGuire

477. “She was a woman with something to protect. That made her more dangerous than they could ever have suspected.”

— Seanan McGuire

478. “Sometimes you say ‘nonsense’ like it’s an idea and sometimes you say it like it’s a proper name,” said the Baker. “Why is that?”

— Seanan McGuire

479. “What you mean and what you say should be similar, or you risk people not understanding you.”

— Seanan McGuire

480. “The day you don’t have a problem, you’ll probably decide that that’s a problem, and go looking for one.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

482. “You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it’s better than admitting the journey’s over.”

— Seanan McGuire

483. “As often as men slam me into things, you’d think I’d get laid more.”

— Seanan McGuire

484. “We need a plan.” “Don’t die,” suggested Ryan. “We need a better plan.” “Don’t get seriously injured,” said Uncle Mike. I eyed him.”

— Seanan McGuire

485. “My personal favorite was the week they spent calling him “the God of Absolutely Never Smiling, No, Not Ever.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

487. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

493. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

495. “Nameless McBitchypants.”

— Seanan McGuire

496. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

498. “This is terrible,” said Sumi brightly. “I mean, we knew it was going to be terrible when we followed a mad scientist and her dead girlfriend to a horrifying murder world, but this is bonus terrible. This is the awful sprinkles on the sundae of doom.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

500. “I didn’t love him, but there was a time when I might have, and that was enough to move me forward. I needed to be needed. This wasn’t the right way.”

— Seanan McGuire