Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

359. “The trouble with denying children the freedom to be themselves – with forcing them into an idea of what they should be, not allowing them to choose their own paths – is that all too often, the one drawing the design knows nothing of the desires of their model.”

— Seanan McGuire

360. “Beauty was all the brighter against a background of briars.”

— Seanan McGuire

361. “There’s nothing wrong with making a last stand. Just make sure you bring enough grenades to share with the entire class. – Alice Healy.”

— Seanan McGuire

362. “Everyone who wound up at Eleanor West’s School – everyone who found a doorway – understood what it was to spend a lifetime waiting for something that other people wouldn’t necessarily understand. Not because they were better than other people and not because they were worse, but because they had a need trapped somewhere in their bones, gnawing constantly, trying to get out.”

— Seanan McGuire

363. “I dislike the dead returning to life,” said Etienne, his shoulders slumping again. “It’s untidy and inappropriate.”

— Seanan McGuire

364. “I only looked when I was sure he couldn’t see me. Some games are too dangerous to play.”

— Seanan McGuire

365. “When all else fails, put on a fresh coat of lip gloss and pretend you have no idea what that horrible thing that just went running down Main Street was. A surprisingly large number of people will believe you.”

— Seanan McGuire

366. “Eleanor West spent her days giving them what she had never had, and hoped that someday, it would be enough to pay her passage back to the place where she belonged.”

— Seanan McGuire

367. “They’re all the ghostroads, and they’ve all got one thing in common: they’re all physical evidence of the scars mankind leaves on the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

368. “In the way of bookish children, she carried her books into trees and along the banks of chuckling creeks, weaving her way along their slippery shores with the sort of grace that belongs only to bibliophiles protecting their treasures.”

— Seanan McGuire

369. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

372. “I’m not sorry,” said Quentin. “One of them tried to take my throat away from me. With its teeth. I’m not you. I need my throat.”

— Seanan McGuire

373. “True power wasn’t convincing a cowardly lot to be afraid of something that people were already afraid of; it was giving them a complex that made them run screaming when a fluffy kitten came bounding into the room.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

375. “Hope only got you hurt. Hope was her least favourite thing, of all the things.”

— Seanan McGuire

376. “Dr. Reynard – not the name that he was born with, but then, how many people can be truly defined by their original names in both childhood and maturity? A truly sensible culture would grant a person a new name with every decade of their life, until age and perspective allowed them to choose the name that would grace their tombstone – closed his door.”

— Seanan McGuire

377. “You’ll always come back to warn him, no matter how much danger it could put you in, no matter what it costs you, because he cared for you when you thought you were nothing. You were never nothing. That didn’t matter. Perception is everything in this world.”

— Seanan McGuire

378. “I’ve always found profanity to be a lot like bacon,” said Ciara. “It works wonders on the flavor of your speech, but it lacks impact when used excessively.”

— Seanan McGuire

379. “Shooting to wound was only a few inches from missing your target entirely, and a different few inches from killing them.”

— Seanan McGuire

380. “I didn’t want to go. I’m not a hero; I never have been. I just do what has to be done.”

— Seanan McGuire

381. “Love is so rarely enough. The poets told a lot of lies.”

— Seanan McGuire

382. “She is his living mausoleum.”

— Seanan McGuire

383. “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

384. “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

385. “I had a great deal of respect for his straightforward nature, and for his willingness to pick people up by the throat. It seemed efficient.”

— Seanan McGuire

386. “She was a story, not an epilogue.”

— Seanan McGuire

387. “I would greatly prefer it if you didn’t put a bullet into my brain; it would complicate my plans for life, most of which involve not being dead.”

— Seanan McGuire

388. “It can be easy, in the end, to forget that children are people, and that people will do what people will do, the consequences be damned.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

390. “Older than I look, younger than I ought to be. My skin is a riddle not to be solved, and even letting go of everything I love won’t offer me the answer. My window is closing, if that’s what you’re asking. Every day I wake up a little more linear, a little less lost, and one day I’ll be one of the women who says ‘I had the most charming dream,’ and I’ll mean it. Old enough to know what I’m losing in the process of being found.”

— Seanan McGuire

391. “The bedroom was as opulently decorated as the front room, with a bed large enough to hold six, and a wardrobe that should by all rights have contained a doorway to Narnia, or at least the deeper lands of Faerie.”

— Seanan McGuire

392. “I’m not really into cremating my cookies.”

— Seanan McGuire

393. “It was like they had all learned to be a little kinder, or at least a little more careful about what they based their judgements on.”

— Seanan McGuire

394. “Now, if you will excuse me, a dead woman is trying to convince me to drink something that comes in layers.”

— Seanan McGuire

395. “Alex would make a terrible Martian,” said Sarah. “He doesn’t have a giant laser and he’s not planning an Earth-shattering kaboom.”

— Seanan McGuire

396. “These days, everyone wants to eat, but no one wants to take the time and care needed to coax the land into giving up its glories. People don’t change. We’re always selfish, and we’re always hungry. We’ve just gotten better at looking at greed and saying ‘Oh, that’s self-interest, that’s all right.’ We’ve forgotten the way the word ‘enough’ feels on the tongue.”

— Seanan McGuire

397. “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.”

— Seanan McGuire

398. “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

399. “Not because we feel children shouldn’t be allowed to haunt – because they’re creepy as all hell, and we’d all feel better if they moved on.”

— Seanan McGuire

400. “Please don’t mistake villainy for evil. The two can exist side by side while remaining quite distinct.”

— Seanan McGuire