Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

264. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

266. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

268. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

276. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

278. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

284. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

286. “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

287. “Not that we’d had much opportunity for casual conversation – all our conversations so far had been focused on killing each other, killing something else, or trying not to get ourselves or anybody else killed.”

— Seanan McGuire

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

295. “Weapons, at least, were predictable; weapons made sense. A sword was just a knife with delusions of grandeur. A trident was a really big fork...”

— 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. “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

299. “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

300. “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