Quotes from Robin McKinley

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

My sheets had never been so clean as they had in the past few months. I hardly got them on again before something else happened and I was feverishly ripping them off and stuffing them in the wash with double amounts of soap and all the extra buttons pushed: extra wash, extra rinse, extra water, extra spin, extra protection against things that go bump in the night.

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

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

What was new was the fact that, despite my heart doing its fight-or-flight, help-we're-prey-and-HEY-STUPID-THAT'S-A-VAMPIRE number, I was glad to see him. Ridiculous but true. Scary but true.

Sungold blew impatiently and began to dig a hole with one foot. She booted his elbow with her toe and he stopped, but after a moment he lowered his head and blew again, harder, and she could feel him shifting his weight, considering if she might let him dig just a small hole.

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

What you describe is how it happens to everyone: magic does slide through you, and disappear, and come back later looking like something else. And I'm sorry to tell you this, but where your magic lives will always be a great dark space with scraps you fumble for. You must learn to sniff them out in the dark.

I am hurt...in ways you cannot see, and that I cannot explain, even to myself, but only know that they are there, and a part of me, as much as my hands and eyes and breath are a part of me.

Because she was a princess she had a pegasus.

She poured the water, arranged some bread near enough the embers to scorch but not catch fire, and looked up at Little John. She was so accustomed to his step, to his bulk, that it took a moment to notice his face; and when she did . . . It was, she thought, rather like the moment it took to realize one had cut one's finger as one stared dumbly at the first drop of blood on the knife-blade. You know it is going to hurt quite a lot in a minute.

Cigars should be like onions, she said, unfastening the catch and pushing back the pane. Either the whole company does, or the whole company does not.

Mice are terribly chatty. They will chat about anything, and if there is nothing to chat about, they will chat about having nothing to chat about. Compared to mice, robins are reserved.

at four o'clock in the morning, when the world is full of magic, things may be safely said that may not be uttered at any other time, so long as the person who listens believes in the same kind of magic as the person who speaks.

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

Why do you tell me... so much? Luthe considered her. I tell you... some you need to know, and some you have earned the right to know, and some it won't hurt you to know-- He stopped.... Some things I tell you only because I wish to tell them to you.

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

He grunted; she recognized it as relief that she wasn't going to nag him further about Tor the Just, who probably wasn't that boring if he could hold off the Notherners for nine days and melt a hole in the hills.

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

but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago something or other or die had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.

There was, too, a reality to her new life that her old life had lacked, and she realized with a shock that she had never truly loved or hated, for she had never seen the world she had been used to living in closely enough for it to evoke passion in her.

We had to go back to the coffeehouse: the Wreck was there. Mel had walked over. Well, I don't know about walked . He had come over without vehicular assistance anyway.

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

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.