Robin McKinley Quotes

The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you've done a story justice, you're in the wrong business.

When they finished laughing they were on their way to being not just friends, but the dearest of friends, the sort of friends whose lives are shaped by the friendship.

Because she was a princess she had a pegasus.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.

There are things you don't want to know you can do

My capacity for invention is flash hot stark, I thought. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras. Pity about the rest of me.

Perhaps it is a human thing, to look upon such beauty and fail to encompass it.

[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered.

The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.

I almost wish I'd had the forethought to eat a tree myself.

With the knowledge of her aloneness came a rush of self-declaration: “I will not be nothing.”

And if my choice is to sit graciously in my best robes and accept the inevitable or to bail a sea with a bucket, give me the bucket.

One doesn't generally look into mirrors when one is especially angry; one has better things to do, like pace the floor or throw things.

He didn't look insane or inhuman. He did look uncooperative.

Vampire. Dangerous. Unknowable. Seriously creepy. This one's name was Constantine. We'd met before.

...like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?

The insides of our own minds are the scariest things there are.

But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leav­ing out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it.

[Gonturan] is a true friend, but a friend with thoughts of her own, and the thoughts of others are dangerous.

Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.

As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to.

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.

If you wish, I shall go personally to your City and knock together the heads of Perlith and Galooney.

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?

...there remained a strange formality between them, and her pleasure in his presence felt too much like missing him had felt during the last week.

Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn't be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.

I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?

It seems to me further, that it is very odd that fate should leave so careful a trail, and spend so little time preparing the one that must follow it.

the bus timetable sites are all run by an inbred cabal of malicious gnomes. Who don’t speak English. And who don’t count very well either. Or tell time. And they certainly can’t read maps.

Cigars should be like onions," she said, unfastening the catch and pushing back the pane. "Either the whole company does, or the whole company does not.

Tell me who you are. You need not tell me your name. Names have power, even human ones. Tell me where you live and what you do with your living.

I said with perfect honest, "I have no intention of trying to take these suckers out by myself, no.

Tiny fists can hurt quite a lot when they hit you in the face.

It was too important a matter, this talking to people, and listening to them, to do it lightly or often.

I didn’t want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad.

Betrayal would be a different sort of sick.

What was new was the fact that, despite my heart doing its fight-or-flight, help-we're-prey-and-HEY-STUPID-THAT'S-A-VAMPIRE number, I was glad to see him. Ridiculous but true. Scary but true.

Your attitude is perhaps a little unnecessarily rigorous," suggested Jack.

But it was equally clear to her that this was her fate, that she had called its name and it had come to her, and she could do nothing now but own it.

Mice are terribly chatty. They will chat about anything, and if there is nothing to chat about, they will chat about having nothing to chat about. Compared to mice, robins are reserved.

I long for another human face just as I fear it.

Tsornin's nostrils showed red, but his ears were as alert as ever, and occasionally he would rub his nose gently against the nape of her neck, just in case she was momentarily not thinking about him.

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you. Can I trust him? What do I have to lose?

Sometimes it is better not to know. Sometimes when you do know you just fold up.

She fell asleep, leaning on his chest, and he edged her a little off a particularly painful bruise, leaned his head back against the tree he had propped them up against, and closed his own eyes.

Can't all beasts be tamed?

But the world turns, and even legends change; and somewhere there is a border, and sometime, perhaps, someone will decide to cross it, however well guarded its thorns may be.

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.