Quotes from Robin McKinley

Galanna's gift, it was dryly said, was to be impossible to please.

No, but I am working up to telling you that there is no possibility of there being done what ought to be done-

One of the things she'd learnt on her own, ragged, bemused, zigzag way was that the best sources of useful information were often in strange places...

What … you're a hedgehog!" It stirred at her touch and then curled up tighter. "You're a very small hedgehog. And you shouldn't be wandering round enchanted palaces looking for adventures.

Maybe I should try to be grateful at having been spared intimacy with the most dangerous of the Others. Gave a whole new meaning to the phrase 'under the dark.

It is that I cannot see what I am doing or why, and it is unsettling always to live only in the moment as it passes. Oh, I know one never sees ahead or behind. But I see even less. It is like being blindfolded when everyone else in the room is not. No one can see outside the room – but everyone else can see the room. I would like to take my blindfold off.

The man paused and added with a grin, He also wishes your porter's head on a silver plate for not opening the gate at once upon his herald's declaration of his visit. This tale of threatening brigands is all very well, but can't I see he's the sheriff?

Balthazar was disappointed by all the walking, but he was accustomed to such disappointment. -Hellhound

It is not so easy as running and not running.

I loved every one of these people. And I couldn't take another minute of their company.

The chain round my neck gleamed in the daylight too. It looked more like gold this morning, but if I stirred it with a finger it had a queer iridescent quality not at all like real gold, not that I had much acquaintance with the stuff. I had always favored plastic and rhinestones.

You did not disturb me, said the pegasus. I disturbed myself, that I might speak to you.

There was something very odd about the carpet this morning… More hedgehogs? Many more hedgehogs? Positively a lake of hedgehogs?

Betrayal would be a different sort of sick.

Dogs are very comforting when your world has exploded.

Reread your favorite novel, the one you only let yourself read any more when you're sick in bed.

The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose.

It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered; it just is, like sunlight or mountains. It is for human beings to see the shadows behind the light, and the light behind the shadows. It is, perhaps, why dogs have people, and people have dogs.

It was blissful, spending time with someone who would leave you alone. I loved him for it. And I was happy to repay in kind. It had never occurred to me that leaving someone alone could harden into a habit that could become a barrier.

The rich smell of the rose was almost visible; I fancied it lent a rosy edge to the shadows cast by the firelight.

In fact, she would have added the rider that she wasn't sure it could be done at all, getting to know someone at any succession of such parties, however prolonged.

It had not been a very cheerful journey, not the least for the western excursion into Outlander territory, where a stubborn and pompous old man had refused to listen to the truth; but Corlath had expected what he found and-she thought-saw no use in being discouraged.

I'm your friend, Sunshine," he said. "Everything else is just static on the line.

This place felt like home; not her home perhaps, but someone's home, accustomed to shelter and keep and befriend its master.