Top 300 T. Kingfisher Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Perhaps Welsh fairies stole children and confiscated their vowels.”

— T. Kingfisher

52. “Civettes were not known for their empathy. Tab hooked his claws into her trousers and climbed up, demanding petting, unconcerned that his human was making strange face noises. Humans always made strange face noises; a weasel learned to deal with it.”

— T. Kingfisher

53. “Gail told amusing stories about wildlife rescue and trying to bandage up an injured great blue heron. “I had to wear a welding face mask,” she said. “And if I’d had a riot shield, I’d have used it. Those beaks are like a spring-loaded javelin, and they’re never grateful.” She smiled fondly at the memory of a bird trying to put its beak through her eye.”

— T. Kingfisher

54. “Every time I went over there, she was snipping at him – snip, snip, snip, like her tongue was pruning shears and she was slicing off bits for fun.”

— T. Kingfisher

55. “She’s at peace now,” said Fenris. Agnes gave him an ironic glance. “She’s been at peace for centuries, I think. I still get to cry about it.”

— T. Kingfisher

56. “He likes me best, maybe because I feed him the most often. He tolerates Aunt Tabitha. My uncle won’t go into the basement any more, he claims Bob actually hissed at him once. It would have been a belching sort of hiss, I imagine.”

— T. Kingfisher

57. “You’re bringing the hen?” “She’s got a demon in her,” said the dust-wife. “It’d be rude to leave her for the neighbors to deal with.”

— T. Kingfisher

58. “It was starting to get impatient. A hedgehog hopping irritably on its hind legs is a tragic sight.”

— T. Kingfisher

59. “There’s many a man who’ll not think twice to mistreat a woman but who lives in fear of a habit and a holy symbol.”

— T. Kingfisher

60. “Slate and Brenner sang rounds of dirty songs together. Brenner had a surprisingly good voice. Slate didn’t. She did get to enjoy watching Learned Edmund twitch when she went for the high notes.”

— T. Kingfisher

61. “I’m suggesting that if you’re going to bring hell down upon someone’s head, you should dress for the occasion.”

— T. Kingfisher

62. “Saving a single wondrous thing is better than saving the world. For one thing, it’s more achievable. The world is never content to stay saved.”

— T. Kingfisher

63. “As writers say to each other, “Yes, it’s been done, but you haven’t done it yet.”

— T. Kingfisher

64. “So their leader looks pretty dead,” said Istvhan, who was at the point where a corpse was a welcome break in the tension.”

— T. Kingfisher

65. “Other people’s horrible relatives are remarkably soothing. You can be comfortably appalled without having to deal with them yourself.”

— T. Kingfisher

66. “You didn’t fail,” I said. “They wouldn’t let you succeed. It’s different.”

— T. Kingfisher

67. “That shouldn’t be possible. Caliban, however, took the view that when something impossible was going on, it was best to deal with it as you found it, and not stand around claiming it wasn’t happening.”

— T. Kingfisher

68. “The man in white cleared his throat. “You’re not a swan,” she said. He raised both eyebrows. “I’ve been accused of many things, but never that.”

— T. Kingfisher

69. “I had always had mixed feelings about Narnia, mostly because of the heavy-handed lion-Jesus allegory. I suddenly had very strong feelings that C. S. Lewis had not spent nearly enough time on te sudden realization, when moving between worlds, that nothing could be taken for granted. Maybe fog hung around all day here, even when the sky was bright. Maybe there was no night, or maybe this was what night looked like. Maybe gravity stopped working here on Tusdays.”

— T. Kingfisher

70. “Look, if you can’t laugh about the homicidal fits that make you a menace to society, what’s even the point?”

— T. Kingfisher

71. “I daresay I wasn’t like other girls harder than anyone else ever was. I was so unlike other girls that I wasn’t even like myself, except on Sundays.”

— T. Kingfisher

72. “Knitting socks was not a particularly glamorous hobby, but it filled the same mental need as the sword – careful work that held his attention and hopefully did not allow his mind to wander too far afield. Plus at the end, you got socks out of it, and no one appreciated good socks like a soldier.”

— T. Kingfisher

73. “The mountains in the background loomed like swords, but the city loomed higher, as if it had been made to stand against the mountains.”

— T. Kingfisher

74. “No. I cannot believe that. I must believe that the gods do not send us trials that we cannot endure. It would have been easier to believe that if he hadn’t seen so many people broken by the trials they had endured.”

— T. Kingfisher

75. “The miller back home was like that,′ she said. ‘He had a little bit of power and he lorded it over everyone. Although there’s less damage you can do with a mill than with a religious order.”

— T. Kingfisher

76. “People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain.”

— T. Kingfisher

77. “Well, he’s a dog. They don’t have an idea how the world’s supposed to be, so it doesn’t bother them when it isn’t.” Agnes frowned. “Except herding dogs, I think. They have a pretty clear idea in their heads, so they’re always nipping and worrying and trying to get it to fit.”

— T. Kingfisher

78. “I took my leave of Miss Potter, pausing to compliment her painting. She turned the compliment aside with a practiced air. “I’m well enough. You should see my niece Beatrix. Twice the talent, and an artist’s eye.”

— T. Kingfisher

79. “It doesn’t make you a hero just because everybody else didn’t do their job.”

— T. Kingfisher

80. “Evil, Roderick had said. But it wasn’t evil that I was seeing here. It was alien, a monstrous alienness so far removed from what I understood that every fiber of my being screamed to reject it, so run, to get away.”

— T. Kingfisher

81. “Come on, let’s go back to the coffee shop and I’ll make us Irish coffees and we’ll discuss this like people who don’t die in the first five minutes of a horror movie.”

— T. Kingfisher

82. “There was little honor among thieves, but there was a great deal of practicality.”

— T. Kingfisher

83. “Smart goblins became mechanics. Dumb goblins became soldiers. Really dumb goblins became officers.”

— T. Kingfisher

84. “Mom is tough. It’s easy to think that sweet people are weak, but if you look at all the stuff mom’s lived through; she’s nearly indestructable.”

— T. Kingfisher

85. “If dogs had religion, Satan would be the UPS guy.”

— T. Kingfisher

86. “Summer had read a great many books about magic and animals and changing your shape. Summer’s mother believed that books were safe things that kept you inside, which only shows how little she knew about it, because books are one of the least safe things in the world.”

— T. Kingfisher

87. “Hell, if I kissed him, he’d probably apologize for getting in the way of my lips. That might be an interesting apology.”

— T. Kingfisher

88. “There is nothing in the world so patient as a plant awaiting spring.”

— T. Kingfisher

89. “My phone informed me that it was absolutely talking to the internet, it was happy to talk to the internet, it loved talking to the internet, then as soon as I tried to check my email, it told me it had never heard of the internet and wasn’t entirely sure it existed.”

— T. Kingfisher

90. “Glorious cocked an ear back at her. ‘Things act according to their natures,’ he said. ‘But sometimes our natures are complicated.”

— T. Kingfisher

91. “Stephen watched as she wrapped her arms around her torso, almost unconsciously making herself smaller. He made a mental note to find this former partner and loom over him very insistently.”

— T. Kingfisher

92. “Rhea followed, because when your future husband is a mad sorcerer, following a hedgehog sometimes seems like a good option.”

— T. Kingfisher

93. “Caliban had a brief, vivid memory of one of the older nuns saying: “Maybe their god could use one of those arms to pull his followers’ heads out of their own asses!”

— T. Kingfisher

94. “There was something about poverty that was a little like war. Either you had been there or you hadn’t, and it wasn’t really possible to explain it to anyone who hadn’t.”

— T. Kingfisher

95. “I swear, I am not usually a person who looks up medical conditions online. I lived without health insurance long enough that I am far more likely to try to sleep off anything short of decapitation.”

— T. Kingfisher

96. “Oh no, a human feeling awkward. How terrible.”

— T. Kingfisher

97. “Gran Mae had been racist, in that Southern heavily-in-denial way, where you think watching Oprah counts as having a black friend.”

— T. Kingfisher

98. “They say you can’t go home again, but of course you can. It’s just that when you get there, somebody may have repainted and changed the fixtures around.”

— T. Kingfisher

99. “Nobody tortures people at home. It ruins the carpets.”

— T. Kingfisher

100. “Fenris was a good man and maybe the weakness of being good was that evil didn’t occur to you.”

— T. Kingfisher