Quotes from Patricia A. McKillip

women hold their councils of war in kitchens: the knives are there, and the cups of coffee, and the towels to dry the tears.

How strange to be in a dream one moment and in the world the next, and to know the difference in the blink of an eye.

He had no place in the world, he said once, therefore he could go everywhere.

that once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone.

Sorry, he said penitently. It's a book. I have no common sense around them.

A net of words, he said at last, is more powerful than a net of rope.

When you open your mind and hands and heart to the knowing of a thing, there is no room in you for fear.

But you had a right to be angry." "Yes. But not to hurt those I love, or myself.

He closed his grade book and asked hopefully, What inspired you? Was it Hawthorne? I stared at him. He had to be kidding.

A librarian had found the baby sitting abandoned on the sheer edge of the world; the librarians kept her. That proved shrewd. Nepenthe had drooled on words, talked at them, and tried to eat them until she learned to take them into her eyes instead of her mouth.

I need you to forgive me. And then perhaps I can begin to forgive myself. There is no one but you who can do that either.

Every moment is like a wheel with a hundred spokes in it. We ride always at the hub of the wheel and go forward as it turns. We ignore the array of other moments constantly turning around us. We are surrounded by doorways; we never open them.

He could pick my heart like a rose and watch it wither in his hand. Sometimes I think he is like that. At other times I think he is as simple and golden and generous as our father's fields. And then I see things in his eyes - things that I have never looked at, and I know that I have walked a short and easy road out of my past, while he has walked a thousand roads to meet me. I know Perrin's past; the same road runs into his future. I don't know Corbet.

Once I used my powers. Now I feel like a dancing instructor, reminding the queen whom she is dancing with at this hour and with which foot she should begin.' 'Be thankful,' Gavin advised with a laugh, 'that so far the music is still being played and everyone is trying to dance in harmony.

The message, which one fall or another of the coin would eventually give him, was how to get himself out of his chamber and into Nepenthe's, so that he could tell her why he had not come to tell her why he had not come.

In that place things begin to wear away even as they are built; the living die a little more each day. The sun is too far away; light slides endlessly into night; fire and love consume themselves; the heart tries to warm itself with ashes.

Something - a flick of color, the faint beat of the earth under my feet, or maybe my name in someone's thoughts - made me lift my eyes.

He exuded ambiguities she decided, that was his fascination. His mouth spoke; his eyes said something other: his smile belied everything.... He played with the language of the Circle of Days like a child with an arsenal of twigs.... His music said otherwise it seemed to echo through time out of a past as old as the stones on the hill. He lied with every note he played. Or in his music he finally told the truth.

No song, no peace, no poetry, no end of days, and no forgetting.

Oh...if you were older...It is not a bad thing, itself, but it is a bad thing to be used by men, to have them choose what you must be, and what you must not be, to have little choice in your life. If you were older, you could choose your own way.

You--cannot ever be certain of those you love--that they will not hurt you, even loving you. But to make me certain to love you, will be to take away any love I might give you freely.

It was no warning, no judgment, simply her name, and she could have wept at the recognition of it.

I did not know, until then, that you could disappear into someone's gaze, that bone and heart and breath could melt like shadow into light, until only light was left.

What a dull place the world would be if all the mysteries in it were solved.