Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Coffee and corpses, that’s my life. Sometimes I hate being me.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

254. “Corpses are incapable of offering informed consent, and are hence no better than vibrators.”

— Seanan McGuire

255. “Each time I tell myself you have reached the summit of your strangeness, you find a way to climb still higher.” “Look at it this way: being married to me will never be boring.”

— Seanan McGuire

256. “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

257. “Then he looked back to me, and smiled. It was a terrible expression, filled with edges, and with knives.”

— Seanan McGuire

258. “And who knows what’s going to go wrong next? The Luidaeg, probably. But she’s not telling.”

— Seanan McGuire

259. “A pie?” Now she just sounded dubious. “Was it an evil pie?” “Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

— Seanan McGuire

260. “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

261. “The rot at the root isn’t the revolution, it’s the ruler who refuses to resign. King-breaking is a symptom of sickness, not the cause.”

— Seanan McGuire

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “Everything did, if left long enough to its own devices. Futures, pasts, it didn’t matter. Everything fell apart.”

— Seanan McGuire

268. “Anyone who says the past was perfect is a liar and wasn’t there. Everything that thinks can aspire, and everything that aspires wants something better than what they’ve left behind them.”

— Seanan McGuire

269. “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

270. “The look she leveled on him was pure aunt.”

— Seanan McGuire

271. “Sometimes fairness isn’t the goal. Sometimes it’s all about survival.”

— Seanan McGuire

272. “They thought they had snicker-snatched a little girl – fairies love taking little girls, it’s like an addiction with them – and when they found out they had a little boy who just looked like a little girl on the outside, uh-oh, donesies. They threw him right back.”

— Seanan McGuire

273. “For is it not said That Girl Knows No Fear, and Dammit, Fran, She’s Going To Get Herself Et, and This Is From Your Side Of The Family, Jonathan, No One In My Family Has Ever Hugged A Basilisk Before?”

— Seanan McGuire

274. “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

275. “We’re good,” said Rose, sounding faintly disgusted. “Get into the digestive tract of the hybrid dead woman. Everything’s fine.”

— Seanan McGuire

276. “Painters and sculptors and designers, they take raw materials and turn them into art. Dancers turn themselves into art. We are poetry in motion when we do our jobs right, and we can stop your heart with the point of a toe or the angle of a limb.”

— Seanan McGuire

277. “At least that would be a new disgusting swamp experience, instead of a disgusting swamp experience I’d already had several times that day.”

— Seanan McGuire

278. “I was here for revenge. And revenge did not need a nap.”

— Seanan McGuire

279. “Such is the dichotomy of forests. Even the smallest remembers what it was to cover nations, and the shadows they contain will whisper the knowledge to anyone who listens.”

— Seanan McGuire

280. “Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections.”

— Seanan McGuire

281. “There are worlds built on rainbows and worlds built on rain. There are worlds of pure mathematics, where every number chimes like crystal as it rolls into reality. There are worlds of light and worlds of darkness, worlds of rhyme and worlds of reason, and worlds where the only thing that matters is the goodness in a hero’s heart.”

— Seanan McGuire

282. “It wasn’t fair to play games with the hearts of people who loved me. And they did love me – I had to admit that, or nothing would ever make sense again.”

— Seanan McGuire

283. “He sounded less sad than simply resigned. This was the way he had always expected the world to go; snatching joy out of his hands for the sheer sake of doing it, and not because he, personally, had done anything to earn the loss.”

— Seanan McGuire

284. “An unreported death is just a disappearance in its Sunday clothes.”

— Seanan McGuire

285. “She’s more of a ‘standing really still and hoping nothing eats her’ sort of girl.”

— Seanan McGuire

286. “Try to be careful, okay? You’re the only niece I’m actually speaking to these days. I’m not in the mood to see you dead.”

— Seanan McGuire

287. “Every city is the Impossible City, when a savior is needed badly enough.”

— Seanan McGuire

288. “We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn’t have to pretend to be something we weren’t. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

289. “Toby, if I say challenging him is futile, that you’ll change nothing and only grant the omen you saw this morning power over you... if I say you can save your life and your heart by walking away from this, will it matter?” Part of me – most of me – wanted to say, “Yes, it would matter; please tell me to stay here. If you tell me, I’ll stay.” I didn’t want to go. I’m not a hero; I never have been. I just do what has to be done. But when you get right down to it, isn’t that the definition of hero?”

— Seanan McGuire

290. “Your entire life has been a succession of things you are not equipped for. And while you may have, as you so charmingly say, screwed some of them up, you have, in the main, come through spectacularly well.”

— Seanan McGuire

291. “It wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough. It was everything I deserved.”

— Seanan McGuire

292. “Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. 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

293. “Had she been able to articulate how she felt about her home life, had she been able to tell an adult, Jillian might have been surprised by the way things could change. But ah, if she had done that, she and her sister would never have become the bundle of resentments and contradictions necessary to summon a door to the Moors. Every choice feeds every choice that comes after, whether we want those choices or no.”

— Seanan McGuire

294. “What was the point of hide-and-seek if you weren’t allowed to dig pit traps or attack your opponents from behind?”

— Seanan McGuire

295. “Lying to you would be a mistreatment of what that love means.”

— Seanan McGuire

296. “Love what you do. Even if it’s not what you thought you’d be doing when you were a kid, love what you do. Eventually, it’s going to kill you, and it would be a real pity if you died doing something you hate.” – Evelyn Baker.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

298. “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

299. “There is no fighting in the Library. Anyone who starts a fight or responds to a challenge will be thrown out. You may think you can take me. You’re probably right. But none of you can take the Library.”

— Seanan McGuire

300. “Airplanes: essentially buses that fly, and hence have the potential to drop out of the sky at any moment, spreading your insides – which will no doubt become your outsides sometime during the collision – across whatever you happen to have been flying over. Since we were flying mainly over ocean, I was the sure sharks would appreciate our sacrifice.”

— Seanan McGuire