Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

256. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

263. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

265. “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

266. “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

267. “Coffee and corpses, that’s my life. Sometimes I hate being me.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

269. “There are very few people in this world who will love and treasure us for who we are, rather than who they think we have the potential to someday become.”

— Seanan McGuire

270. “Pass the dynamite.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

273. “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

274. “I visit her grave as often as I can. I leave bouquets of rosemary and rue, and I tell her that I’m sorry, and I promise her that next time I’ll do better. Next time someone makes me a hero, I’ll save them.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

280. “Death doesn’t bother me but murder makes me edgy, and my lack of weaponry suddenly felt like a potentially fatal mistake. If we got back to the hotel alive, I wasn’t coming back here again without my knife and the baseball bat. And maybe a tank, if I could find one fast enough.”

— Seanan McGuire

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

285. “They were supposed to grow up with their hands in each other’s pockets, compensating for one another’s weaknesses, encouraging one another’s strengths.”

— Seanan McGuire

286. “Hey, I’m a psychopomp in service to the Goddess of the Dead,” I say. “Reassuring isn’t in my tool kit.”

— Seanan McGuire

287. “Numbers are simple, obedient things, as long as you understand the rules they live by. Words are trickier. They twist and bite and require too much attention.”

— Seanan McGuire

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

291. “My lord was never sane, but he was my love, once. He always will be, somewhere. Wherever it is that the once upon a times go when they die.”

— Seanan McGuire

292. “You’re a nerd,” I said, and swatted him in the arm. “You seemed all cool and mysterious back when I was afraid of you, but I’m not afraid of you anymore, and I can see clearly that you are a nerd.”

— Seanan McGuire

293. “I am a genius of infinite potential and highly limited patience. People shouldn’t try me so.”

— Seanan McGuire

294. “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

295. “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

296. “That is a pointless spiral of fear and ignorance and I refuse to let it claim me. Try harder! Her mind brillant, traitorous, prone to devouring itself did not stop fretting but at least she was in control again. It was odd to think of ones own mind the enemy. It wasnt always.”

— Seanan McGuire

297. “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

298. “For others, the lure of a world where they fit is too great to escape, and they will spend the rest of their lives rattling at windows and peering at locks, trying to find the way home.”

— Seanan McGuire

299. “Magic doesn’t have to be flashy and huge. Sometimes it’s the subtle things that are the most effective of all.”

— Seanan McGuire

300. “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