Quotes from Robin McKinley

The world turned, and new stories rose up, and the legends of the old days faltered a little, or turned themselves in their course to keep up with the lives of their people, and the lives of great-grandchildren of those they had first known.

And we might have been less bullying out-of-doors if he had been less bullying indoors.

I DREAMED. I dreamed as if the dream was waiting for me

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

My voice came out high and strange, and sticky with wretchedness: 'Why? I know about having to - *invite* - one of your kind.' For about six months when you're thirteen or fourteen it's every teenage girl's favourite story: because it's about finding out you have *power*.

Stuff doesn't happen till you're ready for it. She laughed, and it was a real laugh. Only in theory. Tell me, what were your first cinnamon rolls like? And didn't the recipe look simple and pure and beautiful on the page? And the instructions your teacher gave you, before he left you to get on with it, were perfectly clear and covered everything?

I will do anything it is in my power to do for you, he said. Command me. A vampire, standing on the far side of my bed, wearing my kimono, telling me he'd do anything I asked. Steady, Sunshine.

She looked at them as they looked at each other, and knew why, for the hopelessness was as bright in their eyes as the love.

I think a lot of what keeps the world going is the result of accidents—happy or. otherwise—and taking advantage of these.

Yesterday we had feared a doom we did not know; today the doom was known by us all, and feared no less.

I hadn't thought of evil as being without color but it is. Once you get past plain everyday wickedness, the color is squeezed right out of it. Evil is a kind of oblivion, having destroyed everything on its way there.

There are always cats around Charlie's, but they are usually refugees seeking asylum from the local rat population, and rather desperately friendly.

I am not strong enough, she said. She had never said this aloud to anyone before—anyone but her bees. I know too little, and I do not learn fast enough. And there are not enough hours in the day. And the land has been bent away from true too far and for too long.

Jesse reached into a bottom drawer and brought out a bottle of... oh, hey, single-malt scotch. Some SOFs did know how to live.

Their new Master was coming home: the Master thought lost or irrecoverable. The Master who, as younger brother of the previous Master, had been sent off to the priests of Fire, to get rid of him.

What if the wrong person showed up first and said you were expecting them?' I said. 'I told them middling tall, skinny, weird-looking hair because it will have just been let out of being tied up in a scarf for working in a restaurant and you never comb it, wearing a fierce look,' said Pat. 'I was pretty safe.' 'Fierce?' I said. I also thought, Skinny?, but I have my pride. The part about my hair is true.

But I return to you now all that you did give me: all the rage and the terror, the pain and the hatred that should have been love. The nightmares and the waking dreams that are worse than nightmares because they are memories. These I return to you for I want them no more, and I will bear them not one whit of my time on this earth more.

During the worst of the Voodoo Wars anyone who lived alone with a cat was under suspicion of being a vampire.

The tone of her voice said that she felt she was offering me silk thread to build a bridge across a ravine.

She had told the frog, Certainly, anything; and her father had brought her up to understand that she must always keep her word, the more so because as Princess there was no one who could force her to.

Marian... turned her face at last; there were tear marks on it, and Robin felt a pricking behind his own eyes, that Marian should cry over him.

Sir Richard ignored this, staring at Robin, who was staring at his feet. I love her, you see, he said at last, indistinctly. Sir Richard grimaced. A fine way you have of showing it. A fine thing I should love her at all, do you not think? Robin said, looking up.

If you're a storyteller, your own life streams through you, onto the page, mixed up with the life the story itself brings; you cannot, in any useful or genuine way, separate the two.

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