Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Sometimes closure is the only gift worth giving.”

— Seanan McGuire

402. “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

403. “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

404. “A man who has lived his entire life in a cave does not mourn the sun until he sees it, and once he has, he can never go back underground.”

— Seanan McGuire

405. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

407. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

412. “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

413. “She is his living mausoleum.”

— Seanan McGuire

414. “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

415. “Old enough to know what I’m losing in the process of being found.”

— Seanan McGuire

416. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

418. “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

419. “Don’t let anyone tell you, ever, that this is a zero-sum game. Your genius does not threaten me. It delights and inspires me.”

— Seanan McGuire

420. “Hearts that have been stopped without being damaged can sometimes start again, under the right circumstances. When the right circumstances cannot be arranged, lightning can make a surprisingly good substitute.”

— Seanan McGuire

421. “This, you see, is the true danger of children: they are ambushes, each and every one of them.”

— Seanan McGuire

422. “Time is the substance from which I am made. – Jorge Luis Borges.”

— Seanan McGuire

423. “But oh, sometimes the future is a very long way away, and sometimes the present matters more than anything that might be coming down the line.”

— Seanan McGuire

424. “Elsewhere was a legend and a lie, until it came looking for you.”

— Seanan McGuire

425. “There’s nothing wrong with having a few monsters in the shadows. They keep me remembering what it is that I’m walking away from.”

— Seanan McGuire

426. “I have never seen any place on Earth as beautiful, improbable, and beautifully ridiculous as Australia. Whatever god or devil first conceived of the place deserves some sort of award, and possibly a smack in the head.”

— Seanan McGuire

427. “I know, I know, panic is fun, but sometimes revenge is better,” she said. “Choose revenge. Choose better. I brought you gloves.”

— Seanan McGuire

428. “There was peace in stillness, a serenity that couldn’t be found anywhere else in this hot, fast, often terrible world.”

— Seanan McGuire

429. “Sometimes I think Faerie goes to war as much because we can’t find anyone who’d rather talk things out as for any other reason. Diplomacy is not a valued skill among the Courts. Most of our nobles would prefer to do the dance of manners and then slide a knife between someone’s ribs. It’s more fun than actually discussing trade sanctions and why it’s rude to kill your neighbors.”

— Seanan McGuire

430. “Toby will find a way to fix it,” said Quentin. “She always does.” “I wish I had as much faith in me as you do,” I said. “Believing in you is not your job,” said Tybalt mildly. “It’s ours.”

— Seanan McGuire

431. “I guess I have to change with them. That’s what humans do, after all. We change. Leave the stasis to the gods.”

— Seanan McGuire

432. “We don’t teach you how to dwell. We also don’t teach you how to forget. We teach you how to move on.”

— Seanan McGuire

433. “Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me.”

— Seanan McGuire

434. “But children, ah, children. Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home.”

— Seanan McGuire

435. “Adversity doesn’t exist to make us stronger. Adversity exists because this world is a damn hard place to live. Prove that you’re better than the things it throws at you. Live.”

— Seanan McGuire

436. “Whatever it was, it was the size of a cow, and looked like what you’d get if you somehow managed to cross a beaver and a crocodile, looked at the results, and decided what your new monster really needed was a bunch of extra teeth.”

— Seanan McGuire

437. “I watched him walk after Mags and Quentin until he vanished into the stacks. What can I say? He was still wearing leather pants.”

— Seanan McGuire

438. “Dating Erin would be sort of like dating a blender. Sure, it makes great smoothies, but one day you’re going to be minding your own business and it’s going to switch on and remove your hand.”

— Seanan McGuire

439. “Total freedom was terrifying. Boundaries made it controllable, and hence enjoyable again.”

— Seanan McGuire

440. “Dinners are mostly dull, awful things, all meat and potatoes and things to build healthy minds and bodies. Boring. I bet your dinners with the dead people were a lot more fun.”

— Seanan McGuire

441. “They were sleek and clean and elegant, and when their webs got messed up, they ripped them down and started over again. People could learn a lot from spiders.”

— Seanan McGuire

442. “Even an echo can be afraid, given the proper motivation.”

— Seanan McGuire

443. “For us, places we went were home. We didn’t care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. 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

444. “When I’m a woman, I eat Pop-Tarts and vindaloo. When I’m a big black bird, I eat eyeballs and spleens. It’s all part of the glorious contradiction that is me.”

— Seanan McGuire

445. “Grandma Alice insists he’s alive, and my mother raised me never to contradict anyone who regularly carries grenades.”

— Seanan McGuire

446. “I am so tired of this gothic crap,” I muttered. “Just once, I want to meet the villain in a cheerful, brightly lit room. Possibly one with kittens.”

— Seanan McGuire

447. “It was a train of thought that might have led her to some unpleasant conclusions had it been allowed to continue; this story might have ended differently. A single revelation does not change a life. It is a start.”

— Seanan McGuire

448. “I know your son in all ways better than you do. Remember that, as you consider taking him from me.” “Oak and ash, Raj, don’t talk to my parents like that! Actually, don’t talk to anyone like that. You know modern grammar. Use it.” I didn’t have another roll, so I couldn’t throw it at him. I settled for wadding up my napkin and bouncing it off his head. He frowned at me, clearly unrepentant. “They’re purebloods. They don’t listen to modern grammar.”

— Seanan McGuire

449. “I’m a lot of things, but rational where the people I love are concerned has never been one of them.”

— Seanan McGuire

450. “The part of me that actually cares about being a decent person promptly punched my inner researcher in the jaw and stuffed her in a closet at the back of my head, to be retrieved later.”

— Seanan McGuire