Robin McKinley quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robin McKinley

Robin McKinley Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Robin McKinley on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Dogs are very comforting when your world has exploded.

He will apologize, or I'll give him a lesson in swordplay he will not like at all.

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

It is not a comfortable passion.

Mathin had taught her patience, and she had known all of her life how to be stubborn.

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.

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

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

All you did was sit there, he said. Why are you so tired?
I sat very diligently, she said.

Majid gave me a brief dazzling golden stare and then half-lidded his eyes again. I know when my life is being threatened.

Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.

Because she was a princess she had a pegasus.

And what was I panicking about anyway? Being left alone with myself? I'd rather have a vampire around?

Well. Yes.

I have a new theory about algebra," I said. "In going to learn it by osmosis.

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

If you try to breathe water, you will not turn into a fish, you will drown; but water is still good to drink.

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

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

He laughed, tried to make it into a cough, inhaled at exactly the wrong moment, and then really did cough.

Balthazar was disappointed by all the walking, but he was accustomed to such disappointment.
-Hellhound

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

Can't all beasts be tamed?

Post-traumatic shock, phooey. Seemed to me the trauma was trotting right along with me, like a dog on a leash with its owner. I was the dog. I

Cannot a Beast be tamed?

Then marry me. For I love you, and I do not believe there is anything so wrong with you. You are fair in my eyes and you lie fair on my heart.

Despair was a private weakness she could not afford to indulge.

This place felt like home; not her home perhaps, but someone's home, accustomed to shelter and keep and befriend its master.

You did not disturb me, said the pegasus. I disturbed myself, that I might speak to you.

There were some things that took life and broke it, not merely into meaninglessness, but with active malice flung the pieces farther, into hell.

I feel like a potato that's recently been mashed,she said.

Betrayal would be a different sort of sick.

The king will catch us if the sheriff should fail to and then the Saxon race can be symbolically and romantically hung by the neck till dead.

But their strength is the strength of numbers and of stubbornness and persistence; do not underestimate it.

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

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

I liked that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself.

screen that was longing to give me a lightning-bolt-thunder-roll odin-bloody headache

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.

It goes something like 'There are a lot of ways to be yourself.

Galanna's gift, it was dryly said, was to be impossible to please.

Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.

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.

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you're scared enough. I was scared enough.

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.

I love you. I will love you till the stars crumble, which is a less idle threat than is usual to lovers on parting.

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

And everybody dreams about vampires; we grow up dreaming about them. They're the first and worst monster that lives under everybody's bed.

It was of grey stone, huge block set on block;but it caught the sunlight like a dolphin's back at dawn.

Fairy godmothers?" said the king dubiously. "We'll have a time getting that past the court council - and the bishop.

One keeps searching for ease, she did not say, and not finding it, till the memories of no-pain seem only like daydreams.

It is not so easy as running and not running.

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

I'm your friend, Sunshine," he said. "Everything else is just static on the line.

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

The touch of evil poisons by the idea of it. Reject the idea, and you've rejected the evil

At first Lissar merely ran away; away from the yellow city, away from the prince whom she loved with both halves of her broken heart.

Evil is a kind of oblivion, having destroyed everything on its way there. I

You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.

I loved every one of these people. And I couldn't take another minute of their company.

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

First rule: If your dog doesn't do what you want, it's your fault.

I have a mastery of the art of worrying that is a burden to me if I may not use it.
Robin

I give you a small serenity.

No, but I am working up to telling you that there is no possibility of there being done what ought to be done-

When you're feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren't thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week.

We may not like it, but we need human friends, because we have human enemies whether we will or nay.

he followed me with his eyes as if I wore a black hood and carried an axe, and he was next in line.

HIs riders knew most of this, even if they did not see it with the dire clarity Corlath was forced to ...

I'd always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be living fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice.

She had courage enough, but little imagination; or she would not have forgotten joy, whatever the weight on her.

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

And perhaps it did not matter in what world she belonged if both worlds were marching in step.

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.

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

There's always a nest time,' said the king, 'unfortunately. You just don't know what it's going to be about.

Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for ...

But it is not, as we say when we are being diplomatic, a fruitful source of inquiry.

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

It is halfway true that if you are involved in a family coffeehouse you don't have a life.

Stop it. This is me, remember? We've been thrown up by the same puppies. - Ossin

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.

She was ashamed. She would not
she would not
be frightened of him: he was what he was, and he had made a promise he would keep.

I disliked promises on principle because my conscience made me keep them

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

Say yes, babe, or I'll spill you off over the Wall next time - got it?

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

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

She fell in love with him, and he with her; that's a spell if you like.

But he hated to see his people people unhappy
because he was a good king, not because he was a nervous one

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.

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.

It's hard to look too grand when you're led by someone who looks like a pudding with legs.

including Rilly, who was beside herself with excitement, and her mother, who was beside herself with Rilly

We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses.

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

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