Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You can’t do this alone. Nobody can. Nobody should have to.”

— Seanan McGuire

52. “It can’t all be dreams because a broken dream will kill you as surely as a nightmare will, and with a lot less mercy. At least the nightmares don’t smile while they take you down.”

— Seanan McGuire

53. “I am an archivist. I am a librarian. I collect words because words are the truest and longest-lasting craft in the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

54. “A life that is lived carefully, calmly, with thorough preparation and sufficient resources, is likely to be healthy, long, and incredibly boring. Fortunately, I have never been in danger of living that particular life.”

— Seanan McGuire

55. “I didn’t look back. Sometimes, not looking back is the only mercy the world has left to show.”

— Seanan McGuire

56. “True love isn’t all chocolate-dipped strawberries and perfect harmony. It’s work, work you enjoy doing, but work all the same. As long as love can drive you crazy and bring you back for more at the same time, it’s a good thing.”

— Seanan McGuire

57. “You know, just once, I want a beautiful woman to exploit me for something other than my magic and dangerous political connections.”

— Seanan McGuire

58. “That’s why people shouldn’t get too hung up on labels. Sometimes I think that’s part of what we do wrong. We try to make things make sense, even when they’re never going to.”

— Seanan McGuire

59. “I’m not stupid, I just don’t know stuff,” said Rini.”

— Seanan McGuire

60. “It’s time that we finally admitted that we can see the love that’s everywhere, filial and romantic and platonic and shared by all different types of people, in all different combinations. This is the future. All we have to do is open our eyes, and see.”

— Seanan McGuire

61. “You can live your life in “should” and never change anything.”

— Seanan McGuire

62. “Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me, she thought, and the words were true enough that she repeated them aloud: “Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me.”

— Seanan McGuire

63. “If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.”

— Seanan McGuire

64. “She discovered the pure joy of reading for pleasure, and was rarely – if ever – seen without a book in her hand. Even in slumber, she was often to be found clutching a volume with one slender hand, her fingers wrapped right around its spine, as if she feared to wake into a world where all books had been forgotten and removed, and this book might become the last she had to linger over.”

— Seanan McGuire

65. “Sometimes ‘fair’ is bigger than just you. Sometimes ‘fair’ has to think about what’s best for everyone.”

— Seanan McGuire

66. “I’ve always been better at being strong for other people than I am at being strong for myself. Maybe it’s the way I was raised – or maybe it’s the way I was made.”

— Seanan McGuire

67. “Time resumed. Time had a way of doing that.”

— Seanan McGuire

68. “Don’t you always have a problem? The day you don’t have a problem, you’ll probably decide that that’s a problem, and go looking for one.” “I can’t say you’re wrong, but this is a real problem.”

— Seanan McGuire

69. “That’s mortal magic. They patch the holes in the world with words, and sometimes those words can hold long after the truth has worn away.”

— Seanan McGuire

70. “A lady is never truly embarrassed. And if she is, a lady is never gauche enough to leave survivors. – Evelyn Price.”

— Seanan McGuire

71. “Many things exist in a state of patient paradox, waiting for some change of circumstance to tilt them one way or the other.”

— Seanan McGuire

72. “Sometimes my comfort is less important than someone else’s heart.”

— Seanan McGuire

73. “Answers are bitter things, and once you get them, they’re yours and you can’t give them back. Did I want to know badly enough that I was willing to live with whatever answer she gave me?”

— Seanan McGuire

74. “I just wasn’t sure it was a good idea to approach heroing the way I’d always approached detecting. Can you really shake the world until justice falls out?”

— Seanan McGuire

75. “Family matters more than anything else in this world. Family doesn’t have to love you. Family doesn’t even have to like you. But when you need them, family has to have your back.” – Kevin Price.”

— Seanan McGuire

76. “Your family, your real family, will always welcome you home with open arms. Anyone who says you can lose their love isn’t really family, no matter what blood says.”

— Seanan McGuire

77. “I am the sea witch. I am the tide you fear and the turning you can’t deny. I am the sound of the waves running over your bones on the beach, little man, and I am not amused at finding you on my doorstep.”

— Seanan McGuire

78. “No matter how much time we spent together, parts of my world would always be as alien to him as parts of his were to me. That was oddly comforting, and gave me the strength I needed to do what had to be done. “You?”

— Seanan McGuire

79. “When you decide to be the immovable object standing in front of the unstoppable force, you’d better pray that you’re right about being immovable, and they’re wrong about being unstoppable.′ ‘Otherwise, you’ll wind up like a bug on a windshield.”

— Seanan McGuire

80. “You mustn’t blame yourself for things you didn’t do and couldn’t have prevented. That way lies madness.”

— Seanan McGuire

81. “She was a story, not an epilogue. And if she chose to narrate her own life one word at a time as she descended the stairs to meet her newest arrival, that wasn’t hurting anyone.”

— Seanan McGuire

82. “This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm.”

— Seanan McGuire

83. “If you’re hurt, you let me help you heal,” I said. “If you’re damaged, we learn the ways around it together. I don’t care whether you can be fixed. I don’t care whether you flinch at shadows. All I want is for you to be with me – and let me be a part of whatever ‘getting better’ looks like now.”

— Seanan McGuire

84. “You are truly endearing when you sleep. I attribute this to the exotic nature of seeing you in a state of silence. – Tybalt.”

— Seanan McGuire

85. “You can’t skip to the end of the story just because you’re tired of being in the middle. You’d never survive.”

— Seanan McGuire

86. “For trust not him that hath once broken faith. – William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part III Q.”

— Seanan McGuire

87. “It makes no sense, so it makes more nonsense.”

— Seanan McGuire

88. “When in doubt, play dead. Well, unless you might be dealing with a ghoul, or a basilisk, or something else that likes its meat a little ripe. Actually, when in doubt, just start shooting. – Alice Healy.”

— Seanan McGuire

89. “Thomas? I think I’m going to need a bigger gun.”

— Seanan McGuire

90. “Sumi was Sumi. Spending time with her was like trying to form a close personal relationship with a cloud of butterflies. Pretty – dazzling, even – but not exactly companionable. And some of the butterflies had knives, and that was where the metaphor collapsed.”

— Seanan McGuire

91. “I’m not going to tell you that everything is going to be fine. I wouldn’t do it even if I was still allowed to lie. Some things are too cruel even for a sea witch. But I will tell you that what’s on the other side of that door is never going to be as bad as the undertow in your own mind.”

— Seanan McGuire

92. “Hope hurts. That’s what you need to learn, and fast, if you don’t want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep holding on to things that won’t ever be so again, and you bleed and inch at a time until there’s nothing left.”

— Seanan McGuire

93. “Don’t mistake me for a friend because I sometimes choose to be friendly,” said the Luidaeg.”

— Seanan McGuire

94. “There’s always time for tea.”

— Seanan McGuire

95. “Children are capable of grasping complex ideas long before most people give them credit for, wrapping them in a soothing layer of nonsense and illogical logic. To be a child is to be a visitor from another world muddling your way through the strange rules of this one, where up is always up, even when it would make more sense for it to be down, or backward, or sideways.”

— Seanan McGuire

96. “No one works the night shift in a diner for long without learning that the world is bigger, and bleaker, than they ever dreamed.”

— Seanan McGuire

97. “Snow White never learns not to eat the apple, and her spiritual sister in fruit-based stupidity, Persephone, does the same with her new husband’s pomegranate tree.”

— Seanan McGuire

98. “Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn’t broken.”

— Seanan McGuire

99. “She was ordinary. She was remarkable. Of such commonplace contradictions are weapons made.”

— Seanan McGuire

100. “My brother went for guns, more guns, bigger guns, and, also, guns.”

— Seanan McGuire