Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Logic and loss aren’t always great friends. Sometimes we mourn for the things that hurt us. Sometimes, that’s okay.”

— Seanan McGuire

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “A man who has lived his entire life in a cave does not mourn the sun until he sees it, and once he has, he can never go back underground.”

— Seanan McGuire

256. “Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children was an island of misfit toys, a place to put the unfinished stories and the broken wanderers who could butcher a deer and string a bow but no longer remembered what to do with indoor plumbing. It was also, more importantly, a holding pen for heroes. Whatever they might have become when they’d been cast out of their chosen homes, they’d been heroes once, each in their own ways. And they did not forget.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “Everything is fluid. Everything needs someplace to go.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

287. “I think the rules were different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn’t care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.”

— Seanan McGuire

288. “Pass the dynamite.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

291. “Your head. It’s got its own undertow, you know, and if you swim too deep, it can suck you down. You can’t chase the tide. You need to stay on the shore and let it come to you.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to tell you that everything is going to be fine. I wouldn’t do it even if I was still allowed to lie. Some things are too cruel even for a sea witch. But I will tell you that what’s on the other side of that door is never going to be as bad as the undertow in your own mind.”

— Seanan McGuire

292. “But he kept running. Sometimes, after all, that’s what must be said to make a hero: the willingness to keep running even after it becomes clear that the entire exercise is doomed to failure. Sometimes heroism is pressing on when the ending is already preordained.”

— Seanan McGuire

293. “Pretty, pithy, petty Moon, born to a woman who had left the Market for the comforting climes of a world where fair value was something each person could negotiate for themselves, rather than having it imposed from without by an unimpeachable force of nature. Sweet, sharp, sour Moon, whose true name could never be given because it had been lost, who had seen her world narrow to an owl’s understanding of hunt and hole and hover. This story could so easily have belonged to her.”

— Seanan McGuire

294. “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

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

— 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. “Hearts are resilient. They can heal over and over again. That’s the good part. The bad part is that having a resilient heart means it can be broken so many times that it feels like it should never recover, like it should be nothing but a pile of shards in my chest.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

299. “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

300. “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