Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

404. “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

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. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

408. “The habit of narration, of crafting something miraculous out of the commonplace, was hard to break... Narrate the impossible things, turn them into a story, and they could be controlled...”

— Seanan McGuire

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

413. “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

414. “Just so you know, I had already decided I was adopting you and taking you home to meet the rest of the family. I really, really hope you wanted siblings, because you now have two sisters, a brother, a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law, and assorted cousins, aunts, uncles, and other such familial detritus.” James looked back to me, blinking in slow bewilderment. “Ah,” he said finally. “I suppose I’ll have a busy Christmas.”

— Seanan McGuire

415. “I could give you children,” said Jack, sounding faintly affronted. “You’d have to tell me how many heads you wanted them to have, and what species you’d like them to be, but what’s the point of having all these graveyards if I can’t give you children when you ask for them?”

— Seanan McGuire

416. “We’ve much to do, and time does insist on being linear here, because it’s awful.”

— Seanan McGuire

417. “She is his living mausoleum.”

— Seanan McGuire

418. “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

419. “Sadly, as I had come to learn, sometimes being a pincushion is my purpose in life.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

421. “Hummingbird girl, running on caffeine and borrowed energy. He’s seen what happens when that energy runs out. He never wants to see it again.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

423. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

429. “But Dr. Bleak said that conducting psychological experiments on the neighbors never ended well, and he was in charge, so Jack kept her thoughts to herself.”

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

431. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

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

— Seanan McGuire

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Seanan McGuire