Quotes from Patricia A. McKillip

Then she dropped her hands in her lap and stared out the window at the restless water that ran beyond the edge of the world, and pulled the sun and the moon and the stars every night down into its secret country.

Gyre did not comment. She glanced at him, found an odd open, rueful expression on his face, as if he were looking inside and found himself lacking. It was unusual, she thought; his confidence seemed always unassailable. No one is unassailable, he said, shifting a branch in the fire with his bare hand. Then he turned his head quickly to meet her cold eye. I'm sorry. My thoughts were drifting; they floated into yours." Anchor them, she suggested drily. "I will try.

We have withdrawn into ourselves not out of horror, but out of a need to reconstruct the patterns we have called truth. In the very fabric of the realm, its settlement, history, tales, war, poetry, its riddles - if there is an answer there, a shape of truth that holds itself, we will find it.

You can weave your life so long—only so long," Coren says to Sybel, "and then a thing in the world out of your control will tug at one vital thread and leave you patternless and subdued.

I write fantasy because it's there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places.

Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored.

The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.

The man was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there

She is our moon. Our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl's eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves.

Night is not something to endure until dawn. It is an element, like wind or fire. Darkness is its own kingdom; it moves to its own laws, and many living things dwell in it.

If you have no faith in yourself, then have faith in the things you call truth. You know what must be done. You may not have courage or trust or understanding or the will to do it, but you know what must be done. You can't turn back. There is now answer behind you. You fear what you cannot name. So look at it and find a name for it. Turn your face forward and learn. Do what must be done. -Deth to Morgon, Prince of Hed-

I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.

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

Love and anger are like land and sea: They meet at many different places.

I thought of you with your hair silver as snow all through that cold, slow journey from Sirle. I felt you troubled deep within me, and there was no other place in the world I would rather have been than in the cold night riding to you. When you opened your gates to me, I was home.

It's an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.

Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.

There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.

That's the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it.

All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles.

Shall I add a man to my collection?

The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there. -Cyrin