Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

358. “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

359. “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

360. “Quentin didn’t bother with the preliminaries. He grabbed a paper cup and trotted over to me, holding it at arm’s length. “Here,” he said. “Coffee.“”And thus am I reminded why I allow you to live.”

— Seanan McGuire

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

365. “I don’t like parties. Someone always tries to assassinate someone I actually like, and there are never enough of those little stuffed mushroom caps.”

— Seanan McGuire

366. “Hail!” chorused the mice. “Hail the High Priest of Goddammit Eat Something Already!”

— Seanan McGuire

367. “She is his living mausoleum.”

— Seanan McGuire

368. “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

369. “It wasn’t easy, but like I’ve always said, if you can’t lie to yourself, who can you lie to? The food.”

— Seanan McGuire

370. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “No matter how bad the world gets, you still have to feed the cats.”

— Seanan McGuire

376. “Sumi was just explaining how you’re the most boring cardboard parody of a girl ever to walk this world or any other, and we should all feel sorry for you,” said one of the strangers, adjusting her glasses as she turned to look at Nancy. “That makes you sound like my kind of person. Please, sit, and relieve some of the tedium of our table.”

— Seanan McGuire

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

386. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

399. “Parents don’t always like to admit that things have changed. They want the world to be exactly the way it was before their children went away on these life-changing adventures, and when the world doesn’t oblige, they try to force it into the boxes they build for us.”

— Seanan McGuire

400. “It was like Rhys had ordered the whole thing from Castles R Us, and then never bothered to swing by the local Bed, Battlements, and Beyond for the accessories he’d need to make it believable.”

— Seanan McGuire