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

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

— Seanan McGuire

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

372. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

380. “May’s style was best described as “Jem and the Holograms meets Rainbow Brite.”

— Seanan McGuire

381. “Come here, she said. “I need to hold someone, and you need to be held. It’s a fair trade. Just for a little while, and then we can go on being what we are.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

383. “It gets better. It never gets easy, but it does start to hurt a little less.”

— Seanan McGuire

384. “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

385. “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

386. “You’re a nerd,” I said, and swatted him in the arm. “You seemed all cool and mysterious back when I was afraid of you, but I’m not afraid of you anymore, and I can see clearly that you are a nerd.”

— Seanan McGuire

387. “All’s well that ends with only minor lacerations. – Alice Healy.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

389. “There are a lot of issues with the three-tens,” I said. “First off, a lot of the time, the poor kids who wind up cast as ‘princes’ get thrown out of second-story windows and permanently maimed. There have been reports of Rapunzels who sunk so deep into their stories that they actually could cure blindness with their tears, but we haven’t had one of those in years, and it’s not company policy to let unmonitored memetic incursions progress to that level.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

392. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “I had to admire the Evil Dead-level dedication that went into thinking “I’ll take a chainsaw into battle against a werewolf,” even as I wanted to find out who thought it was a good idea and shake them until they realized the error of their ways. Almost.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

400. “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