Top 300 T. Kingfisher Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Roses have thorns. That’s the price of roses. When you start to forget that, that’s when things go wrong.”

— T. Kingfisher

102. “I’m a freelance editor. I turn decent books into decently readable books and hopeless books into hopeless books with better grammar.”

— T. Kingfisher

103. “Tastes like rat squeezins’ with too much honey.”

— T. Kingfisher

104. “She was used to being stubborn, but having people agree with her was off-putting and didn’t give her much to work with.”

— T. Kingfisher

105. “The Forester patted a log next to her. ‘Come and sit, child. Tell me about your journey, and start a little before the beginning, because we are usually wrong about where things begin.”

— T. Kingfisher

106. “She was still going somewhere terrible, but she had a hedgehog, dammit.”

— T. Kingfisher

107. “There were too many problems with wizards and fairies and odd things popping up in the corners of the potato field for anyone to want to invite more supernatural intervention.”

— T. Kingfisher

108. “I no longer have a church to serve, so I will swear to you, instead.”

— T. Kingfisher

109. “Inspiration knocks now and again, but spite bangs on the door all year long.”

— T. Kingfisher

110. “If there’s a way into hell, someone will always find it.”

— T. Kingfisher

111. “It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to be fattened up and eaten, or turned into a donkey, or forced to wear hair shirts and ashes like the children of wicked parents in fairy tales. But if your parents were wicked, you needn’t worry about pleasing them. When they were doing the best they could, you had no traction at all.”

— T. Kingfisher

112. “The rabbit flicked its ears, looked up at Brenner, and said, in a deep, thoughtful voice, “You’ll die laughing, you know.”

— T. Kingfisher

113. “Ladies, Get you a man who can handle a portal to hell without freaking out.”

— T. Kingfisher

114. “Also, you stabbed her. Stabbed. Pointy metal jammed into flesh. Women do not forgive you for that in a hurry. Men either, generally.”

— T. Kingfisher

115. “Slate wiggled her bare toes at him. “I have one pair that is not more hole than sock. They are taking a well-deserved rest. They are heroes of the sock world.”

— T. Kingfisher

116. “Miss Marple is always saying that one sees so much evil in a small village. That’s how she solves all the murders. They all remind her of things she saw in her village.”

— T. Kingfisher

117. “Everybody yells at Orpheus and Lot’s wife. Put yourself in their shoes for five minutes and you’d yell a lot less, I promise you.”

— T. Kingfisher

118. “Do I trust you? thought Gerta. I barely know you and you frightened me and then you kissed me, and truth be told, that frightened me even more.”

— T. Kingfisher

119. “Was magic as primitive as trading blood and pain for hope?”

— T. Kingfisher

120. “Thank you,” breathed Rhea. “Oh, thank you! I will never step on a slug again!” She could have sworn that the nearest slug turned its eyestalks toward her in reproach.”

— T. Kingfisher

121. “I’d been tired of it a decade ago. Now I’d moved to some other state entirely. Transcendent exhaustion, perhaps.”

— T. Kingfisher

122. “Anywhere there’s people, there’s a possibility of evil, wouldn’t you say?”

— T. Kingfisher

123. “Unlike the mice, gremlins really were a problem. If you ground one into flour on accident, the bread had a tendency to explode in the oven, or bleed when you cut into it, or turn into a flock of starlings and tear around the cottage shrieking, and then people came around and had words with the miller, many of which had only four letters and involved hand gestures.”

— T. Kingfisher

124. “Well, if I live through this, my nightmares will be amazing.”

— T. Kingfisher

125. “I am not a nun,” said Slate. “Incidentally, that’s the first time I’ve ever had to tell anyone that.”

— T. Kingfisher

126. “You never forget some things,” said Bryony. Three deportment teachers had nearly broken themselves training those things into her, and one had actually quit and gone into the seminary afterwards.”

— T. Kingfisher

127. “There is something about a group of people that is less than the sum of its parts.”

— T. Kingfisher

128. “I fear that I am not the best possible person for this, but I am the best possible person available at this time, which is much the same thing.”

— T. Kingfisher

129. “You cannot help people who do not want help,” rumbled Fenris. “You can’t force someone to do what you think is best for them.” He paused, then added, somewhat reluctantly, “Well, you can. But they don’t appreciate it and most of the time it turns out that you were wrong.” “But – ” “We can only save people who want to be saved,” said the dust-wife. “If it’s still bothering you, we’ll come back afterward, assuming any of us are alive to do so.”

— T. Kingfisher

130. “The larger part of power was understanding the power you had over others, even if you would rather not have had that much power in the first place.”

— T. Kingfisher

131. “Ah. American. That explained the clothes and the way he stood with his legs wide and his elbows out, as if he had a great deal more space than was actually available.”

— T. Kingfisher

132. “Justice seemed so little, so late.”

— T. Kingfisher

133. “Do you think I don’t know how to act around thieves and ruffians?” “The fact that you even use a word like ‘ruffians’ is not filling me with confidence, no.”

— T. Kingfisher

134. “The old woman snorted. “Knives aren’t magic, girl. All they are is sharp. Cut or don’t, but don’t dither over it. It only makes it worse for both of you.” Janna.”

— T. Kingfisher

135. “Hours passed, like a kidney stone.”

— T. Kingfisher

136. “The problem with crying in the woods, by the side of a white road that leads somewhere terrible, is that the reason for crying isn’t inside your head. You have a perfectly legitimate and pressing reason for crying, and it will still be there in five minutes, except that your throat will be raw and your eyes will itch and absolutely nothing else will have changed.”

— T. Kingfisher

137. “We weren’t big on funerals in my family. I know some families have these massive orgies of grief, where all the third cousins come back and sob over the casket, but we’re not like that.”

— T. Kingfisher

138. “Then she smiled and it was terrible. Madeline’s lips pulled up at the corners in a terrible parody of good humor, her mouth stretching painfully wide, her jaw dropped so far that it looked almost like a scream. Above that awful grin, her eyes were as flat and dead as stones. I do not delude.”

— T. Kingfisher

139. “My dear, I am certain that you can go on about how unworthy and incapable you are for hours yet, but we have very little time. Let us pretend that we have done all that and that I have nodded correctly and made the proper noises, and skip to the point where you say, “I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll try.”

— T. Kingfisher

140. “Rage was only useful if you were allowed to do anything with it.”

— T. Kingfisher

141. “Sorry, guys. We’re not all tragic heroes. Some of us are just tragic.”

— T. Kingfisher

142. “I don’t know why I’m second-guessing Crevan’s sanity – I’m sitting here talking to a hedgehog mime.”

— T. Kingfisher

143. “They looked like the dreams of trees cast in bronze.”

— T. Kingfisher

144. “It was not a terribly good stab. Millers’ daughters do not traditionally spend a great deal of time engaged in single combat.”

— T. Kingfisher

145. “It was still white, and it still glowed under the moon, and the cobbles were still as rounded as old skulls, and the leaves still looked like splashes of blood across the stones, but Rhea felt better. She was still going somewhere terrible, but she had a hedgehog, dammit.”

— T. Kingfisher

146. “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. Of course, there’s people like that, too.” “A great many of them,” rumbled Fenris. “They are either excellent organizers or terrible zealots. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of middle ground.”

— T. Kingfisher

147. “The carver had clearly heard of the golden ratio and wanted no truck with it.”

— T. Kingfisher

148. “In all the old stories, the only thing that ever won was love. And occasionally a good sharp knife.” “I’ll.”

— T. Kingfisher

149. “I am delighted by obscure passions, no matter how unusual. During the war, I was once holed up in a shepherd’s cottage, listening for the enemy to come up the hillside, when the shepherd launched into an impassioned diatribe on the finer points of sheep breeding that rivaled any sermon I have ever heard in my life. By the end, I was nodding along and willing to launch a crusade against all weak, overbred flocks, prone to scours and fly-strike, crowding out the honest sheep of the world.”

— T. Kingfisher

150. “Magic never seemed to be much use at doing the things you wanted done in a reasonable time frame.”

— T. Kingfisher