Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

304. “Grandma married him because he was the first man she’d ever met who wasn’t affected by her telepathy. This is the sort of thing that Internet dating sites never have a field for.”

— Seanan McGuire

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

312. “I love ‘sort of,’ ”I said dryly. “It’s such a beautifully useless phrase.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “Parents lied to children when they thought it was necessary, or when they thought that it would somehow make things better. It only made sense that children should lie to parents in the same way.”

— Seanan McGuire

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

326. “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

327. “Her mind – brilliant, traitorous, prone to devouring itself – did not stop fretting, but at least she was in control again. It was odd, to think of one’s own mind as the enemy. It wasn’t always. The tendency to obsession and irrational dread was matched by focus and attention to detail, both of which served her well in her work.”

— Seanan McGuire

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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. Reality, it must sadly be said, has a way of complicating things, even things we might believe could never be that complicated.”

— Seanan McGuire

335. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

337. “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

338. “Sometimes closure is the only gift worth giving.”

— Seanan McGuire

339. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

343. “I drop to my knees, more tired than I should be. Exhaustion after death just isn’t fair.”

— Seanan McGuire

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

348. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire