Seanan McGuire Quotes

Then Angela turned on Kade, and said, “I meant what I said. It’s sick, how you pretend like you’re something you’re not.”
“I was about to say the same thing to you,” said Christopher. “I mean, you always did a pretty good job of pretending to be a decent human being. You had me fooled.”

You know, sometimes I almost forget how creepy you are, and then you go and say something like that.

The nameless girl stared at Cora. “You’re insane.”
“Probably,” said Cora placidly. “Sticks and stones, as the sages say; sticks and stones. I know what I am and I’m happy this way, and saying something true shouldn’t be an insult, ever, because that’s not how words want to work.”

The Queen of Cakes pursed her lips. “You must be from Sumi’s world,” she said primly. “You’re just as obnoxious as she was. She’s quiet now. How did you make her that way?”
“Well, she died, so that was a large part of it,” said Kade.
“Dead people normally stay in their graves, out of the way of the rest of us.”

Heroism is addictive. Maybe that's why it sounds so much like 'heroin.'

Katherine understood rules. Understood them down to the marrow of her bones. Rules were the reason the world could work at all. Following the rules didn’t make you a good person, just like breaking them didn’t make you a bad one, but it could make you an invisible person, and invisible people got to do as they liked.

It can be easy, when hearing about someone else’s adventures in a far-off, magical land, to say “I would never choose the mundane world over the fantastical. I would run into rivers of rainbow as fast as my legs would carry me, and I would never once look back.” It is so often easy, when one has the luxury of being sure a thing will never happen, to be equally sure of one’s answers. Reality, it must sadly be said, has a way of complicating things, even things we might believe could never be that complicated.

Miss Hansard, who had been teaching for nearly twenty years, slumped against her desk and wondered when retirement had gone from a distant impossibility to something to be devoutly yearned for. They got younger every year. She was certain of that much, at least. They got younger, and harder to understand, every single year.

Sumi was Sumi. Spending time with her was like trying to form a close personal relationship with a cloud of butterflies. Pretty—dazzling, even—but not exactly companionable. And some of the butterflies had knives, and that was where the metaphor collapsed.

There are moments that change everything, and once things have been changed, they do not change back.

"Only one way to find out," said Kade, and started walking.
"Why do people always say that?" muttered Cora, trailing along at the rear of the group. There's always more than one way to find something out. People only say there's only one way when they want an excuse to do something incredibly stupid without getting called on it. There are lots of ways to find out, and some of them even involve not pissing off a man who goes by 'the Lord of the Dead.'"
"Yeah, but they wouldn't be as much fun, now would they?"

Paperwork is a magic in and of itself. It makes spouses out of strangers, makes homes out of houses…and mades students out of runaways.

“My name is Lord of the Forest,” said the stag.
Regan nodded. Every stag she’d ever met had been named Lord of the Forest, even when there was another stag only a few feet away. Deer didn’t understand irony.

We can’t make things that happened not have happened by wishing that they hadn’t.

"If they're being locked, they're being locked. We don't have a key."
"Sometimes, you don't need a key," said Sumi. Her smile verged on feral. "Sometimes a crowbar is good enough."