Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Time is the alchemy that turns compassion into love...”

— Seanan McGuire

202. “When a very serious little girl finds a magical door in the woods, she decides to leave behind a life of loneliness to go off in search of adventure, never expecting to find a mystical Market on the other side – where anything can happen, as long as you pay your debts.”

— Seanan McGuire

203. “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

204. “When the time comes for my current mortal face to end- and it will come, much as I might wish this time could last forever- I will understand the man I must manufacture as my next self all the better because of the children, and their comics. And besides, the X-Men offer many powerful life lessons to which even the eldest among us should attend.”

— Seanan McGuire

205. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

207. “There is wanting and there is needing, and when you want, you can make good choices, but when you need, it’s important the people around you not be looking to take advantage.”

— Seanan McGuire

208. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

226. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

228. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

231. “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

232. “A single revelation does not change a life. It is a start.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

238. “No one should have to sit and suffer and pretend to be someone they’re not because it’s easier, or because no one wants to help them fix it.”

— Seanan McGuire

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

242. “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

243. “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

244. “People aren’t so good at being good to one another. We try hard enough, but something essential was left out in the making of us, some hard little patch of stone in the fertile soil that’s supposed to be our hearts. We get hung up on the bad, and we focus on it until it grows, and the whole crop is lost.”

— Seanan McGuire

245. “There are losses we don’t move past, no matter how hard we try. Some wounds, once inflicted, bleed forever underneath the skin. All we can do is learn to live with them.”

— Seanan McGuire

246. “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

247. “May’s style was best described as “Jem and the Holograms meets Rainbow Brite.”

— Seanan McGuire

248. “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

249. “It gets better. It never gets easy, but it does start to hurt a little less.”

— Seanan McGuire

250. “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