Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Sometimes heroism is pressing on when the ending is already predestined... Sometimes a hero has to fall.”

— Seanan McGuire

202. “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

203. “Clothes matter,” he said, draping the vest over his arm and reaching for a pile of neatly folded blouses. “Clothes are part of how you learn to feel like yourself, and not someone who just happens to look like you. Don’t you remember what it was like when someone else decided what you were going to wear?”

— Seanan McGuire

204. “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

205. “Quentin quieted and watched her for a moment, hungrily, like he was trying to memorize every detail. Maybe he was. Forever is a long time. You have to burn the edges of memory onto your heart, or they can fade, and sometimes the second loss is worse than the first one.”

— Seanan McGuire

206. “There’s one thing the Brothers Grimm got very, very wrong: There’s no such thing as “ever after.” That would require that the story ever end.”

— Seanan McGuire

207. “Time is the alchemy that turns compassion into love...”

— Seanan McGuire

208. “Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

— Seanan McGuire

209. “Her parents loved her, there was no question of that, but their love was the sort that filled her suitcase with colors and kept trying to set her up in dates with local boys. Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn’t broken.”

— Seanan McGuire

210. “Every time I think my family has plumbed the depths of stupidity, somebody goes and finds a goddamn shovel.” – Jane Harrington-Price.”

— Seanan McGuire

211. “Do you remember what I said last night?” “That I needed to feed myself before I tried to buy Moon’s debt,” said Lundy. Her jaw set stubbornly. “That doesn’t seem fair.” “Doesn’t it? Hunger makes us foolish, causes us to make poor decisions without realizing how poor they are. If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.”

— Seanan McGuire

212. “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

213. “Everything was going to be perfect.”

— Seanan McGuire

214. “Roses thrive surprisingly well on blood. I guess that’s why they’re such a foundational part of Faerie.”

— Seanan McGuire

215. “It was nice to have the boys noticing her for a little while, when she was trying to work out social interaction; boobs were like a cheat code for getting along.”

— Seanan McGuire

216. “I had no idea what was going on, but I knew that fighting Tybalt wouldn’t get me out of the darkness. It would strand me there.”

— Seanan McGuire

217. “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

218. “She’d approached the issue of social interaction like it was another puzzle to be solved, another prize to be won.”

— Seanan McGuire

219. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

221. “Little Mermaid, eat your heart out.”

— Seanan McGuire

222. “Kade was possibly the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen. She wanted to spend hours sitting with him and talking about pointless things. She wanted to feel his hand against her skin, to know that his presence was absolute and focused entirely on her. The trouble was, it never seemed to end there, and that was as far as she was willing to go.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

224. “People always mean something. Sometimes what they mean is ‘you can’t be trusted to remember to be kind’, and then I want to bury them up to their necks in marshmallow fluff, so they’ll remember how I choose kindness every single day.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

233. “Quentin Sollys: the Once and Future King of Spiders.”

— Seanan McGuire

234. “That probably wasn’t the smartest thing you’ve ever done. Points for style, I guess. Points off for being too stupid to live.”

— Seanan McGuire

235. “No one deserves to be the only living example of their own kind. No one should be that alone in the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

237. “I don’t want to be a monster. I refuse to be a monster. I am a person, and people get to make our own choices about whether or not we bare our claws.”

— Seanan McGuire

238. “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

239. “It’s not that I don’t date. It’s that I don’t date. I am an essentially misanthropic person: I don’t like people much, and they usually reward me by not liking me either.”

— Seanan McGuire

240. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

242. “The mountain was as powerful as the tide, just... in a different way.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

244. “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

245. “If Dodger were awake, she’d happily tell him exactly how much of her blood is on the floor. She’d look at the mess around them. She’d calculate the surface area and volume of the liquid as easily as taking a breath, and she’d turn it into a concrete number, something accurate to the quarter ounce. She’d think she was being comforting, even if the number she came up with meant “I’m leaving you.” Even if it meant “there is no coming back from this.” Even if it meant goodbye.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

247. “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

248. “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

249. “Even when she slept, she tossed and turned and squirmed, like she was secretly a hurricane forced into a girl-body and told to exist as best she could among people who had no idea what it meant to secretly be a weather pattern.”

— Seanan McGuire

250. “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