Seanan McGuire Quotes

There are many good things in the world, and each of them happens for the first time only once, and never again.

says, and I find I agree, You have to break rules if you want to break free.

“Jack?” Kade took a cautious step forward. “Are you…?”
“There are only a certain number of possible ways to end that question, and the answer to all of them is ‘no,’” said Jack.

My name’s Christopher. I was a friend of Jack’s before she went back to the Moors. I mean, not really. Jack doesn’t have friends, she has minions who haven’t figured out their place in the grand scheme of things.

Cora was very good at ignoring people who told her to do foolish things.

Back where I come from, mothers and fathers live together most of the time. Unless they're divorced."
"What's 'divorced' mean?"
"It means they were married and now they're not anymore, so their kids get double Christmas.

Mysteries in books were the best kind. The real world was absolutely full of boring mysteries, questions that never got answered and lost things that never got found. That wasn’t allowed, in books. In books, mysteries were always interesting and exciting, packed with daring and danger, and in the end, the good guys found the clues and the bad guys got their comeuppance. Best of all, nothing was ever lost forever. If something mattered enough for the author to write it down, it would come back before the last page was turned. It would always come back.

“There might be spiders,” said Jacqueline. She wrinkled her nose, less out of actual distaste and more out of the knowledge that she was supposed to find spiders distasteful. She really found them rather endearing. They are sleek and clean and elegant, and when their webs got messed up, they ripped them down and started over again. People could learn a lot from spiders.

The first man—the Master—raised his goblet in a mocking toast. “To the future,” he said. “It’s on its way now, whether we’re prepared or not.”

Quests were a lot like dogs, Cora thought. They were much more attractive when seen from a distance, and not barking in the middle of the night or pooping all over the house. She had been there for every terrible, wearying, bone-breaking moment of this quest, and it held no magic for her. She knew it too well.

Parents lied to children when they thought it was necessary, or when they thought that it would somehow make things better. It only made sense that children should lie to parents in the same way.

There would be time to grab something from the dining hall before she had to go to English class. The thought of having to analyze the poetry of Emily Dickinson without calories was enough to make her want to cry. Why adults constantly wanted to know what centuries-old poems meant was beyond her. Shouldn’t someone have found the right answer by now? Or at least an answer good enough to accept?

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.

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.

Hope hurts. That's what you need to learn, and fast, if you don't want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying 'don't use this word' and 'don't use that word,' but she never bans the ones that are really bad. She never bans hope.