Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

204. “It must have been very difficult, being Sloane.”

— Seanan McGuire

205. “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

206. “We hated each other so well and loved each other so badly...”

— Seanan McGuire

207. “Australia basically holds the copyright on “weird ecosystem.” The only place where you’re going to find weirder things is at the bottom of the ocean, and no one suggests that you go there for a fun family vacation.”

— Seanan McGuire

208. “At least my headache was almost gone. I always deal better with emergencies when I’m not actively in pain.”

— Seanan McGuire

209. “Oh, her? She had raised a hand against us, and willingly entered our circle. We ate her.”

— Seanan McGuire

210. “Come here, she said. “I need to hold someone, and you need to be held. It’s a fair trade. Just for a little while, and then we can go on being what we are.”

— Seanan McGuire

211. “The Archivist, who had seen a thousand friendships become unbalanced by assumptions about who owed who, even when no one walked cloaked in feathers, was silent for a moment.”

— Seanan McGuire

212. “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

213. “Some questions are okay. You can’t have people without questions. People are too curious for that, they’d get all gummed up and stop working right if you didn’t let them have questions once in a while. But there’s a big difference between asking for things and only asking. ‘Do you think there will be grapes sometime this week’ isn’t the same as ‘can I have some of those grapes.’ Do you understand?”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

234. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

239. “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

240. “Never invite a death omen to a murder party.”

— Seanan McGuire

241. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

243. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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