Top 300 T. Kingfisher Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 7

101. “Gentlemen,” said Beartongue, “I forbid you to smash the Archon’s decor and try to duel with it.” “Yes, your holiness.” “I’ll have you both excommunicated.” Stephen coughed. “Technically we’re not in your church, your holiness.” “Then I will have you confirmed so that I can excommunicate you even harder.”

— T. Kingfisher

102. “Roses have thorns. That’s the price of roses. When you start to forget that, that’s when things go wrong.”

— T. Kingfisher

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

— T. Kingfisher

104. “She had a strong urge to kiss him, and then perhaps beat him about the head and shoulders with his own sword.”

— T. Kingfisher

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— T. Kingfisher

109. “Slate was used to, “Can we help you?” translating as, “If you make me get up, I will have you drawn and quartered.” She’d never heard it mean, “I will throw myself off a building if it will make your day better, sir.”

— T. Kingfisher

110. “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

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

— T. Kingfisher

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

— T. Kingfisher

113. “I met a goddess.” “Well, these things happen,” said Slate. “Except, wait, no, they don’t. What the hell? Why’d you meet a goddess?”

— T. Kingfisher

114. “Meanwhile, Spindle was still looking at me like I was an idiot. Mind you, he did this so often that I was starting to wonder if he just had an eyelid tic or something – surely I couldn’t be that dense, could I?”

— T. Kingfisher

115. “I suspect if I had owned a border collie, this story would have a very different ending, and I probably would not have been around to type it up. But I had Bongo, and he saved our lives because he is simple and made of nose.”

— T. Kingfisher

116. “Normal people flirt. I think. Apparently we just exchange terrible life stories.”

— T. Kingfisher

117. “I could hop into an ER carrying my severed leg and squirting blood from the stump and the doctor would congratulate me on having dropped all that leg weight and tell me to keep up the good work.”

— T. Kingfisher

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

— T. Kingfisher

119. “It was too quiet all evening. I ate cold pizza and drank too much wine. The box said that I should pair it with chimichurri sauce and salsa dancing. The box was going to get British murder shows and like it.”

— T. Kingfisher

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

— T. Kingfisher

121. “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

122. “That should do it. Tell me if you get the urge to take a bite out of someone, though.” “There’s a long list of people I’d like to bite,” said Marra, a bit dryly. The dust-wife snorted. “Fair enough. Just tell me if you get the urge to chew afterward, then.”

— T. Kingfisher

123. “If she was half an animal, let the animal half speak for her, then. The human part was tied up with human things like self-loathing, but that did not matter. There were no words in reindeer speech for I hate myself. It was not a concept that could be thought, and so she did not bother to think it. She.”

— T. Kingfisher

124. “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

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

— T. Kingfisher

127. “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

128. “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

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

— T. Kingfisher

130. “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

131. “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

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

— T. Kingfisher

133. “If you’re looking for a way to break the contract, I do not know. You’d need a demon or a barrister to answer that.”

— T. Kingfisher

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

— T. Kingfisher

135. “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

136. “The room she found herself in, when they had tied her to yet another chair and removed the sack, was larger than the last one. It was also clean, but in the fashion of a room that can be easily sluiced down to get the bloodstains off the walls. That was a happy thought. I’m so glad I had it.”

— T. Kingfisher

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

— T. Kingfisher

138. “It was a cruel spirit that would punish starving people for what they had been forced to eat, but the spirits had never pretended to be kind.”

— T. Kingfisher

139. “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

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

— T. Kingfisher

141. “It occurs to me,” said the weasel, going back to mussing around in her hair, “that you are laboring under the impression that I am some sort of magical familiar. I’m not. I’m really a very ordinary weasel – although quite good-looking, of course – and not magical at all.”

— T. Kingfisher

142. “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

143. “Marra no longer had much faith in fate. She had been born a princess, which should have been lucky, but the price for never going hungry was to be caught in a struggle between people too powerful to call to justice.”

— T. Kingfisher

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

— T. Kingfisher

145. “I will unmake him,” said the clock wife simply. “I will pull the marrow from his bones and pour lead into the spaces left behind. I will make his dying into a place and visit it every day until the end of eternity.”

— T. Kingfisher

146. “Everyone have their souls still? Shadows still attached? Then let’s go before that changes.”

— T. Kingfisher

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

— T. Kingfisher

148. “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

149. “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

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

— T. Kingfisher