Quotes from Kelly Link

So what am I now?" Lee says, teasing. Dodo sighs. Gives Lee a hard look. "A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.

Q: How far will he travel? A: He will travel so far, he will never come home again. His feet will never touch the ground, not for the rest of his life. He will never see his family again. He will never see the cannon again, but for the rest of his life, he will dream of her round, fixed, roaring black mouth.

Todos habláis mucho. Alguien tiene que ser la persona que no hable. La persona que escuche. (...) Es como ser invisible, ¿sabes? No hablar.

And if it's not fake, if it's all real, this fun, these friends, this life, then that's even worse, isn't it?

When he looked over to see if Catherine had heard, she had her head up the tiled fireplace, as if she were trying it on, to see whether it fit. Catherine was six months pregnant. Nothing fit her except for Henry's baseball caps, his sweatpants, his T-shirts. But she liked the fireplace.

If clothes are good, or even if they're bad in an interesting way, The Garment District is where they go when they die.

The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough to prevent this. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it? Here endeth the lesson.

The thing about teaching and having children is that you always ended up treating your children like undergraduates, and your undergraduates like children.

our minds are the machines we must dismantle and rebuild in order to grasp the infinite.

You suppose that you could walk around, but your feet tell you that the map leads directly through the briar wall, and you can't stray from the path that has been laid out for you. Remember what happened to the little girl, your great-grandmother, in her red woolen cape. Maps protect their travelers, but only if the travelers obey the dictates of their maps. This is what you have been told.

Even nightmares have to sleep now and then.

She's wearing a T-shirt that says I'M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES. "Hey

Only a few of the women sport pubic hair. He's never understood what that's about. Some of the men are bare, too. O tempora, o mores.

I know," the Devil says. He whines. "But I still want it. I want things. That's my job. I even want the things that I already have. I want everything you have. I want the things that don't exist. That's why I'm the Devil.

The Bungalow 4 counselor was a twenty-year-old college student named Eric who had terrible acne and wrote poems about the local girls who worked in the kitchen and how their breasts looked lonely but also beautiful, like melted ice cream.

After he got expelled, everybody at school called Jake Houdini instead of Jake. Everybody except for me. I'll explain why, but you have to be patient. It's hard work telling everything in the right order.

No one ever built a fort because the world was safe.

Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there's nothing for it but to fail faster and better.

The Wizard of Oz was a humbug. He's not great and powerful. He just pretends to be great and powerful. The Wicked Witch of the West is greater and powerfuller. She's got flying monkeys. She's like a mad scientist. She even has a secret weakness. Water is like Kryptonite to her.

smart. I'm pretty smart myself. I know that smart doesn't mean nice, or even mean that you have a lot of common sense. Look at all the trouble smart people get themselves into.

God has an inordinate fondness for stars and also for beetles. The small and the very far away.

You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place.

I didn't fall in love with Jake because he was smart. I'm pretty smart myself. I know that smart doesn't mean nice, or even mean that you have a lot of common sense. Look at all the trouble smart people get themselves into.

Year after year On the monkey's face A monkey face