Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Australia basically holds the copyright on “weird ecosystem.” The only place where you’re going to find weirder things is at the bottom of the ocean, and no one suggests that you go there for a fun family vacation.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

311. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

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

— 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. “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

320. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

322. “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

323. “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

324. “No one deserves to be the only living example of their own kind. No one should be that alone in the world.”

— 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. “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

328. “Hey, I’m a psychopomp in service to the Goddess of the Dead,” I say. “Reassuring isn’t in my tool kit.”

— Seanan McGuire

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

338. “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

339. “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

340. “Little Mermaid, eat your heart out.”

— Seanan McGuire

341. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

344. “Children of Maeve reproducing with children of Titania wasn’t like apples mixing with oranges – it was more like apples mixing with cheese graters, or rainbows with hardware stores.”

— Seanan McGuire

345. “You’d think the predators of the world would eventually learn that it’s not a good idea to charge the sort of person who brings throwing knives to a dance club.”

— Seanan McGuire

346. “The God of Scales and Silences is not sick,” said the mouse. The others joined in with nods and sounds of rodent agreement. “He is damaged, yes, and will need Tender Care and perhaps Kisses for his Boo-Boos, but he is not sick.”

— Seanan McGuire

347. “I could write myself out of the play, just like Ophelia before me; it could be over.”

— Seanan McGuire

348. “Death was precious. That didn’t change the fact that life was limited.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire