Quotes from Robin McKinley

I liked that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself.

She was surprised into looking into the Beast's face. The contrasts she found there were too great: wisdom and despair, power and weakness, man and animal. These made him far more terrible than any hungry lion, any half-tamed hydra, any angry sorcerer, terrible as something that should not exist is terrible, because to recognise that it does exist shakes that faith in the foundations of the natural world which human beings must have to bear the burden of their rationality.

Your Chalice, Master, sees all things clearly, which is both her strength and her weakness.

Little John: I would come too. He might want knocking in a stream to cool his anger. Much: I will come too, to fish him out again, and to reassure him that not all of us have this queer craving for hurling folks in water.

Golden arrow? And what would we do with a golden arrow? Give it to Alan for a lute string? I could hang it around my neck on a chain, perhaps, and let it stab me in the ribs when I tried to sit.

I give you a small serenity.

And what was I panicking about anyway? Being left alone with myself? I'd rather have a vampire around? Well. Yes.

she'd found she couldn't bring herself to kill any of her bees, which was the system all the northern demesnes used, and so had to get them through the winter somehow. She'd been cold that winter herself, after wrapping up her most exposed hives in all the blankets she had.

But her curiosity got the better of her and at last she went back to where she'd left a big shallow basin of milk only the day before…and found the surface of the milk invisible under a carpet of her bees. "Bees don't drink milk," she said to them. When they lifted and flew away the basin was empty and clean.

it was nearly dawn, and the hill was white with snow. She was covered with a thick blanket of bees, and the snow lay upon them in bright broken spangles. She sat up in distress— bees cannot survive hard cold outside their hives— but they seemed to shake themselves...

It was one of the good things about him. Whatever he might not be telling you, what he did tell you was the truth.

It wasn't the work of the Chalice she minded. It was the vast unfathomable burden of its responsibility. She still felt the Chalice was incomprehensibly beyond her—even wished that it were incomprehensibly beyond her, so she could give up.

breaking tradition always comes with a noise like mountains falling.

Post-traumatic shock, phooey. Seemed to me the trauma was trotting right along with me, like a dog on a leash with its owner. I was the dog. I

but she brooded not only about how to tackle her father, but also about what, precisely, she was setting out to do. Test the fire-repellent properties of her discovery. Toward killing dragons. Did she really want to kill dragons? Yes. Why? Pause. To be doing something. To be doing something better than anyone else was doing it.

All of the rest of it was still black, lightlessly black, black as if light were an unconvincing myth… - Hellhound

I shall practice, that I may dazzle you when next we meet." There was a little silence, and Luthe said, "You need not try to dazzle me.

And everybody dreams about vampires; we grow up dreaming about them. They're the first and worst monster that lives under everybody's bed.

for he was one of those glittering people whose every gesture looks like a miracle, whose every word sounds like a new philosophy. You've a bit of that yourself, valiantly as you seek to hide it.

I'm real, too. I just don't know, real what.

Rosie hated her curly golden hair. When she was old enough to hold minimal conversations, the itsy-bitsy-cutesycoo sort of grown-ups would pull the soft ringlets gently and tell her what a pretty little girl she was. She would stare at this sort of grown-up and say, "I am not pretty. I am intelligent. And brave.

I'd learned to fish because Mel taught me, not because I longed to impale small invertebrates on barbed hooks and rip hell out of piscine oral cavities and smother fellow oxygen breathers in an alien medium

Cornbread? He brightened immediately. I was as bad as Paulie, really, despite how long I'd been doing this. Someone wants to eat my food, they're automatically my friend. Someone who doesn't want to eat my food, they automatically aren't. This is an awkward attitude if you hang out a lot with a vampire.

Nothing?' said Corlath. 'I said there were two things. I have told you the first. You told us what you saw as you saw it. But this is the second thing: you spoke in the Old Tongue, what we call the Language of the Gods, that none knows any more but kings and sorcerers, and those they wish to teach it to. The language I just spoke to you, that you did not recognize- I was repeating the words you had said yourself, a moment before.