Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “She’d known girls on diets her entire life. Iron-rich blood had rarely, if ever, been their goal. Most of them had been looking for smaller waists, clearer complexions, and richer boyfriends, spurred on by a deeply ingrained self-loathing that had been manufactured for them before they were old enough to understand the kind of quicksand they were sinking in.”

— Seanan McGuire

202. “You insinuated yourself into my heart like a worm into an apple, and I am consumed by you.”

— Seanan McGuire

203. “Some things we have to hide from science, waiting for the day when people will be ready to deal with the idea of talking mice or fish with fur. Other things science hides from itself, because no one really wants the night to be dark and filled with monsters. That era has passed.”

— Seanan McGuire

204. “The moon is the friendliest of the celestial bodies, after all, glowing warm and white and welcoming, like a friend who wants only to know that all of us are safe in our narrow worlds, our narrow yards, our narrow, well-considered lives. The moon worries. We may not know how we know that, but we know it all the same: that the moon watches, and the moon worries, and the moon will always love us, no matter what.”

— Seanan McGuire

205. “Adults can still tumble down rabbit holes and into enchanted wardrobes, but it happens less and less with every year they live. Maybe this is a natural consequence of living in a world where being careful is a necessary survival trait, where logic wears away the potential for something bigger and better than the obvious.”

— Seanan McGuire

206. “This isn’t a place for lies or pretending everything’s all right. We know everything is not all right. If it were, you wouldn’t be here. Now. Where did you go?”

— Seanan McGuire

207. “Someday it will vanish here as well, replaced by the skeleton of the store where someone fell in love, someone had their heart broken, someone died, because that’s the way it works here, in this palimpsest twilight, where America overwrites America in an eternal dance of old becoming new becoming old again.”

— Seanan McGuire

208. “Real’ is a four-letter word, and I’ll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.”

— Seanan McGuire

209. “Love is a powerful thing; it makes us all equals by making us briefly, beautifully human.”

— Seanan McGuire

210. “If someone says ‘sorry’ and you don’t say ‘it’s okay, I’m not mad anymore,’ you’re a bad person. Especially if you’re a girl.”

— Seanan McGuire

211. “But she she didn’t want to be someone they could care for. She didn’t want to be a Kate or a Kitty or even a Kat – all perfectly lovely, serviceable names, for perfectly lovely, serviceable people. People she already knew, at six years of age, that she didn’t want to be. She was Katherine Lundy. Her family loved her as Katherine Lundy. If the children in the yard next door or on the playground couldn’t find her worth loving the same way, she wasn’t going to change for them.”

— Seanan McGuire

212. “Roger guesses people all over the world must use the same tone when they talk to the smart kids, like they were bombs on the edge of going off, instead of children with brains too big for the people they’re supposed to be.”

— Seanan McGuire

213. “Actually, yes, I would say something like ‘there may be bears here.’ Bears are not a pleasant surprise for most people.”

— Seanan McGuire

214. “I may be a composite of multiple dead people, but I’m not stupid.”

— Seanan McGuire

215. “Hyper-religious sapient rodents who worship the Price family as gods.”

— Seanan McGuire

216. “If something happened to Gillian, I’d rip the world down to save her, even if she spat in my face when I did. That’s what parenthood means.”

— Seanan McGuire

217. “Their past is littered with the unburied bodies of the people they chose never to become.”

— Seanan McGuire

218. “That’s the thing about time, about youth. It passes, and you become a bit more yourself with every day gone.”

— Seanan McGuire

219. “Sometimes heroism is pressing on when the ending is already predestined... Sometimes a hero has to fall.”

— Seanan McGuire

220. “New York is a city built upon the cannibalized remains of its own past, constantly changing, constantly the same.”

— Seanan McGuire

221. “Yes, tigers have stripes; so do tabbies. If you want to know the difference, try tossing one of each into your swimming pool. Then I would recommend running.”

— Seanan McGuire

222. “Growing up doesn’t mean getting over everything that happened to us as children. It just means calcifying it and never letting go.”

— Seanan McGuire

223. “The laws of physics have already been violated. What happens if they decide to press charges?”

— Seanan McGuire

224. “There are moments that change everything, mired in the mass of more ordinary time like insects caught in amber. Without them, life would be a tame, predictable thing. But with them, ah. With them, life does as it will, like lightning, like the wind that blows across the castle battlements, and none may stop it, and none may tell it “no”.”

— Seanan McGuire

225. “It’s not that I enjoy surprising everyone I know; it’s more that I almost never know where I’m going before I actually get there.”

— Seanan McGuire

226. “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

227. “Every world gets to make its own rules. Sometimes those rules are going to be impossible. That doesn’t make them any less enforceable.”

— Seanan McGuire

228. “Magic is nice, but napalm is reliable.”

— Seanan McGuire

229. “Logic and loss aren’t always great friends. Sometimes we mourn for the things that hurt us. Sometimes, that’s okay.”

— Seanan McGuire

230. “There are times when I wish we weren’t all so good at forgetting that everything is connected to everything else. Because those are the times when people get hurt.”

— Seanan McGuire

231. “A valet pulled up in a sleek-lined sports car painted that particular shade of red peculiar to expensive vehicles and hookers’ lipstick.”

— Seanan McGuire

232. “They can be hard for their families to understand, those returned, used-up miracle children. They sound like liars to people who never had a doorway of their own. They sound like dreamers. They sound... unwell, to the charitable, and simply sick to the cruel.”

— Seanan McGuire

233. “Nothing good survives summarization. Not even pie, and pie is a universal constant of goodness.”

— Seanan McGuire

234. “Magical thinking might seem like nonsense to some people, but he had danced with skeletons by the light of a marigold moon, he had kissed the glimmering skull of a girl with no lips and loved her as he had never loved anything or anyone in his life, and he thought he’d earned a certain amount of nonsense, as long as it helped him get by.”

— Seanan McGuire

235. “Hello carnivore,′ said the mouse priest. He turned and bowed to Uncle Mike and Dominic. ‘Hail to the High Priest of Goddammit Eat Something Already, and to the God of Hard Choices in Dark Places.’ Ryan blinked. ‘What?’ ‘It’s a mouse thing, just roll with it, you’ll be happier that way,’ I advised.”

— Seanan McGuire

236. “Sometimes I think it must have been nice to be alive in the days where everyone knew that Faerie existed. Sure, bands of angry humans sometimes tried to kill us with iron and fire, but nobody questioned where we wanted to celebrate the seasons.”

— Seanan McGuire

237. “Pass the dynamite.”

— Seanan McGuire

238. “Sometimes, when it seems like the pain is never going to end, I wish I’d gotten a different suite of magical talents from my mother. Like the power to avoid situations that end with me willingly jamming my arm into a door made entirely from animate, apparently angry rose briars.”

— Seanan McGuire

239. “We went down, and at the bottom there was a door, and on the door there was a sign. Two words. BE SURE. Sure of what? We were twelve, we weren’t sure of anything.”

— Seanan McGuire

240. “Remember, Very,” Dad used to say when I whined about the goggles, “if your opponent has night vision and you’ve never bothered to learn the local landmarks by anything but sight, you’re going to be in a bit of a pickle when it’s time to avoid getting disemboweled.”

— Seanan McGuire

241. “Someone made us. Someone made us, and then they separated us because we were dangerous when we were together.”

— Seanan McGuire

242. “If we encounter heretics while on the search for our brave Priestess, we will smite them down with the Fury of a Thousand Angry Rolling Pins!” squeaked the mouse. “Don’t know what that means, really. I’ve got to assume it’s pretty dire, since it’s coming from a talking mouse,” said Uncle Mike.”

— Seanan McGuire

243. “This was always the difficult part, back when she’d been at her old school: explaining that “asexual” and “aromantic” were different things.”

— Seanan McGuire

244. “Ah, ambushes. Those take me back. The best ones are the ones that start with chloroform and handcuffs, and end with death threats and knives. And by ‘best’ I mean ‘most irritating,’ you understand.”

— Seanan McGuire

245. “Sometimes that’s all you can do. Just keep getting through until you don’t have to do it anymore, however much time that takes, however difficult it is.”

— Seanan McGuire

246. “Better cranky and alive than cheerful and dead.”

— Seanan McGuire

247. “You had years of medical knowledge behind you, scores of experts beside you, and still you chose to run like dumb animals, useless and panicked, to infect the world that you were so sure existed to obey you.”

— Seanan McGuire

248. “Life was one long series of efforts to reach the golden mean, where everything was the way that it was supposed to be.”

— Seanan McGuire

249. “IT CAN BE EASY, when hearing about someone else’s adventures in a far-off, magical land, to say “I would never choose the mundane world over the fantastical. I would run into rivers of rainbow as fast as my legs would carry me, and I would never once look back.” It is so often easy, when one has the luxury of being sure a thing will never happen, to be equally sure of one’s answers.”

— Seanan McGuire

250. “This was Confection, land of the culinary art become miracle; land of lonely children whose hands itched for pie tins or rolling pins, for the comfortable predictability of timers and sugar scoops and heaping cups of flour. This was a land where perfectly measured ingredients created nonsensical towers of whimsy and wonder – and maybe that was why they could be here, logical creatures that they were, without feeling assaulted by the world around them.”

— Seanan McGuire