Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “One day you will have to tell me where you acquired this aversion to walking on solid ground,” said Dominic. “Try having a baby sister whose idea of a good time involves pit traps and land mines,” I advised.”

— Seanan McGuire

304. “She said she’d been in relationships with way bigger problems than one of us being a transitory manifestation of impending doom. Like this one girl who liked her computer more than she liked her girlfriend, and another one who smoked.”

— Seanan McGuire

305. “People don’t believe things that are too perfect.”

— Seanan McGuire

306. “What just happened?” asked Jeff. “Sloane just yelled at the story until it went away,” I said blankly.”

— Seanan McGuire

307. “I am what I am, and there’s much about me that won’t be changed with any amount of wishing or wanting. I’m sorry for that. I’d trade a great deal to share an afternoon in the hay with you, dust in the air and sweat on our skins and neither of us caring. But I’m afraid the experience would drive me mad. I am a creature of sterile environments. It’s too late for me to change.”

— Seanan McGuire

308. “Just believe me when I say you can’t trust anything you read on the Internet until you confirm it.”

— Seanan McGuire

309. “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

310. “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

311. “There is a choice here, hanging like smoke in the autumn air. She can cry for the friends she doesn’t have, mourn for the games she isn’t playing, or she can let them go. She can be the kind of girl who doesn’t need anyone else to keep her happy, the kind of girl who smiles at adults and keeps her own company. She can be content.”

— Seanan McGuire

312. “Children are capable of grasping complex ideas long before most people give them credit for, wrapping them in a soothing layer of nonsense and illogical logic.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

314. “Like a key that finds its keyhole, Nancy was finally home.”

— Seanan McGuire

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “Every choice feeds every choice that comes after, whether we want those choices or no.”

— Seanan McGuire

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

328. “When a scientist speaks, it behooves the ordinary soul to listen.”

— Seanan McGuire

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

333. “Hail the purchase of the socks!” cried the mice, before dissolving into general rejoicing.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

335. “Hope means you keep holding on to things that won’t ever be so again.”

— Seanan McGuire

336. “Repetition is sometimes the best way to deal with the Luidaeg: just keep saying the same thing over and over until she gets fed up and gives you what you want. All preschoolers have an instinctive grasp of this concept, but most don’t practice it on immortal water demons. That’s probably why there are so few disembowelments in your average preschool.”

— Seanan McGuire

337. “The history of the human race has been one long quest to find, novel things and then kill, eat, or enslave them. There’s a reason the aliens haven’t made an appearance yet, is what I’m saying.”

— Seanan McGuire

338. “Paperwork is a magic in and of itself. It makes spouses out of strangers, makes homes out of houses.”

— Seanan McGuire

339. “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

340. “Here, bodies are just another tool, to be stolen or traded as the people in power see fit. Burning down someone’s lab before they’ve been properly vanquished, on the other hand, is rude.”

— Seanan McGuire

341. “Let my roots grow strong and my skin grow thick, that I might stand fast against all who would destroy me.”

— Seanan McGuire

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

345. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

347. “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

348. “I walk with my hands in my pockets and the streetlights casting halogen halos though the fog, and I can’t help thinking this is probably what Heaven will be like, warm air and cloudy skies and the feeling of absolute contentment that only comes from coffee and pie and knowing your place in the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

349. “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

350. “Going back” had two distinct meanings at the school, depending on how it was said. It was the best thing in the world. It was also the worst thing that could happen to anybody. It was returning to a place that understood you so well that it had reached across realities to find you, claiming you as its own and only; it was being sent to a family that wanted to love you, wanted to keep you safe and sound, but didn’t know you well enough to do anything but hurt you.”

— Seanan McGuire