Top 300 T. Kingfisher Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “She should at least keep chickens,” said the dust-wife. “Or take up gardening. Immortality is wretched, but you can always make the best of it.”

— T. Kingfisher

202. “Granted, she hadn’t known Stephen that long, but if you couldn’t bond over multiple corpses, what could you bond over?”

— T. Kingfisher

203. “She had presumably decided that the problem was the village, and if everybody in the village was gone, they would have to bring John back to take care of her. It was the sort of plan a child would come up with – simple, self-centered, and utterly heartless.”

— T. Kingfisher

204. “That had always been her great gift and her besetting sin, that even in the darkest and most somber times, she had the urge to laugh.”

— T. Kingfisher

205. “Panic was definitely called for right now, but for some reason, if there’s two people, only one of you panics at a time.”

— T. Kingfisher

206. “Ironically I am publishing this in the midst of COVID-19, when we all started making sourdough at home and then started protesting police brutality. Suddenly a twelve year old book was actually relevant. Go figure.”

— T. Kingfisher

207. “It struck Marra, watching, as an extravagance of grief. Someone wanted the world to know how sad he could afford to be.”

— T. Kingfisher

208. “She’d have been thrilled if he’d vanished. She’d have decided that he ran away to spite her, probably with another woman. She’d have milked that so hard that she’d have lived another thirty years on pure hate.”

— T. Kingfisher

209. “Rage shivered through her, a rage that seemed like it could topple the halls of heaven, then vanished under the knowledge of her own helplessness. Rage was only useful if you were allowed to do anything with it.”

— T. Kingfisher

210. “The Good Lord looks out for fools. In your case, apparently He sends the occasional Englishwoman.”

— T. Kingfisher

211. “Hate, like love, was apparently complicated.”

— T. Kingfisher

212. “Am I really the only person concerned about the severed head situation in this city?” said Stephen. “Really?”

— T. Kingfisher

213. “Sarkis turned around and began to beat his forehead very gently against the wall. “The great god is punishing me,” he said softly, “for my crimes. I cannot go to his hell, and so he has sent a woman to torment me.”

— T. Kingfisher

214. “She walked back to the boardinghouse, with the woman who had a puppet at her throat and the girl sitting on the steps who missed more meals than she ate and who was crowing about babies that weren’t quite right.”

— T. Kingfisher

215. “But just because you need someone doesn’t mean that they are under any obligation to provide.”

— T. Kingfisher

216. “Ah,′ said Zultan. ‘I, too. I keep many books at my home.’ He gestured to the books in the tent. ‘These are only a few. Those I think might need on this trip, and those I have yet to read and might want, and those old friends that I cannot bear to leave behind.”

— T. Kingfisher

217. “We’re friends, by which he means he respects my talents and nobody’s paid him money to kill me.”

— T. Kingfisher

218. “People were remarkably willing to dismiss their own sight. Marra thought perhaps that the world was so strange and vision so flawed that you soon realised that anything and everything could be a trick of the light.”

— T. Kingfisher

219. “I did not in fact brush Barbie’s hair. I did once attempt to mummify her, though. Mom convinced me that I did not actually have to remove Barbie’s brains with a hook through her nose, but did allow me to wrap her in toilet paper and bury her in the sandbox. In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious why I turned out the way I did.”

— T. Kingfisher

220. “It is a great relief, when one has thrown away normal life in search of their heart’s desire, to know that one is doing it right and isn’t going to get yelled at for going the wrong way.”

— T. Kingfisher

221. “The core of being a witch is that you don’t fall down while there’s work to be done. Sometimes that means you invent work to keep yourself standing upright.”

— T. Kingfisher

222. “There were so few people who kept a sense of humor when they were miserable, you learned to appreciate it.”

— T. Kingfisher

223. “It is gratifying,” said Learned Edmund. “The world is often sorely unappreciative of quality indexing.”

— T. Kingfisher

224. “The town probably had a name, but Clara never learned it. It was the Place of Hot Tea and Beds, Sacred Holy Land of St. Toad.”

— T. Kingfisher

225. “You show up to basic training and they hand you a sword and a new set of pronouns.”

— T. Kingfisher

226. “Books on World War II appear spontaneously in any house that contains a man over a certain age. I believe that’s science.”

— T. Kingfisher

227. “I expect this won’t be your last set of medals, my dear. Heroism is an unfortunate habit.”

— T. Kingfisher

228. “Holly had a cheerful pink face and big, twinkling blue eyes, and Bryony occasionally had to remind herself that her sister also had a mind like a handful of razors.”

— T. Kingfisher

229. “You never knew when you might have to cut and run. Normal people probably didn’t worry about that. Normal people probably had nice, normal lives. Grace only had her own life, and it had taught her that you took precautions because life changed too often at other people’s whims and sooner or later, everything would be taken away.”

— T. Kingfisher

230. “Having men want to rescue you was worlds different than simply having a female friend who had your back. If she needed a body buried, the only question Marguerite would ask was, ‘How deep?”

— T. Kingfisher

231. “Very unlikely people, you know, will share confidences with each other if they think the other person understands. A prisoner who won’t tell a guard anything will thaw immediately if he’s put in a cell with another man in for the same crime. And doctors who would bite off their own tongues before showing indecision to a patient will tell another doctor about how little they know and how frightened they are. I’ve seen it happen many times. It’s how spies work.”

— T. Kingfisher

232. “Still, ecru. It’s like if you couldn’t decide on white or beige and combined the two for maximum blandness.”

— T. Kingfisher

233. “I looked at them for quite a long time, then I looked away and Simon didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything and we both did not say anything so loudly that the room rang with our silence.”

— T. Kingfisher

234. “The dead are there, whether you believe in them or not.”

— T. Kingfisher

235. “She made dramatic plans in the darkness and discarded them in daylight.”

— T. Kingfisher

236. “Run and be free. They cannot use what they cannot find.”

— T. Kingfisher

237. “I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. It was all so ridiculous. Gran Mae thought she could get me about my weight? I’d come out of academia. If she wanted to tear me apart, she should have commented on my doctoral thesis.”

— T. Kingfisher

238. “Have you ever considered giving up killing people and becoming a tailor?” “Oh, yes.” “And?” “I don’t like people unless I’m stabbing them.”

— T. Kingfisher

239. “Learn what you can. Use what you learn. You have not failed yet.”

— T. Kingfisher

240. “The first person we’d met and I wanted to get the hell away as quickly as I could. Typical.”

— T. Kingfisher

241. “Strange, the powers you find sometimes, in a garden at the end of the road.”

— T. Kingfisher

242. “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

243. “I am not spending twenty dollars on a candle,” said my mother. Phil pulled her to her feet. She was clearly favoring her ankle and had to lean on his arm. “For twenty dollars, it would have to give me an orgasm every time I lit it.” Phil made a small sound of emotional distress.”

— T. Kingfisher

244. “They pretended they weren’t there as guards and Nessilka pretended her goblins weren’t being guarded, and everyone was reasonably happy.”

— T. Kingfisher

245. “How dare he tell me about his awful past at a particularly relevant moment? The nerve of the man!”

— T. Kingfisher

246. “Don’t stare,′ murmured the dust-wife, ’but don’t look away if someone looks at you. Show as little weakness as you can. Agree to nothing and accept nothing until you know the price.”

— T. Kingfisher

247. “You have been released to the Temple for discipline, you are forbidden from carrying arms in the presence of the Archon for a year and a day, Judge Guicciard wants a personal apology, and I am supposed to dock your pay to cover the statue, but since I don’t actually pay you, we’ll just let that bit pass.” She waved a hand. “Consider yourself disciplined. No dessert for a week. Etc.”

— T. Kingfisher

248. “Summer had never had a father, and wasn’t entirely sure what you did with one.”

— T. Kingfisher

249. “It is not wise to hurt the house’s feelings.”

— T. Kingfisher

250. “When she is not writing, she is probably out in the garden, trying to make eye contact with butterflies.”

— T. Kingfisher