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

302. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “Sometimes, good intentions do more damage than all the wicked plots in all the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

325. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “Hope means you keep on holding to things that won’t ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there’s nothing left.”

— Seanan McGuire

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “Some days it’s not worth crawling out of the shallow woodland grave, I swear. “Be.”

— Seanan McGuire

336. “Are you always this fond of stating the obvious, or am I just the lucky recipient of your sarcasm?” “Bit of both,” said Basil. “Right.”

— Seanan McGuire

337. “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

338. “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

339. “We’re good,” said Rose, sounding faintly disgusted. “Get into the digestive tract of the hybrid dead woman. Everything’s fine.”

— Seanan McGuire

340. “Painters and sculptors and designers, they take raw materials and turn them into art. Dancers turn themselves into art. We are poetry in motion when we do our jobs right, and we can stop your heart with the point of a toe or the angle of a limb.”

— Seanan McGuire

341. “I was here for revenge. And revenge did not need a nap.”

— Seanan McGuire

342. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

349. “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

350. “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