Seanan McGuire

Author

1978-01-05

Quotes by Seanan McGuire

• Adversity doesn't exist to make us stronger. Adversity exists because this world is a damn hard place to live. Prove that you're better than the things it throws at you. Live.

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• Parthenogenesis means never having your mother tell you to stop doing that or you'll go blind.

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• But that's what family is, isn't it? It's traditions and trinkets that only matter when we hold them up against the mirrors of our lives, lending them meaning, lending them weight, until they become heavy enough to endure without us. We create the past in the things that we choose to remember about it. We turn everything into stories, and those stories matter because we say that they do. It's all a wheel, and ours are the hands that turn it.

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• Growing up in my family meant ambushes on your birthday, crossbows for Christmas, and games of dodge ball where the balls were occasionally rigged to explode. It also meant learning how to work your way out of a wide variety of death traps. Failure to get loose on your own could lead to missing dinner, or worse, being forced to admit that you missed dinner because your baby sister had tied you to the couch. Again.

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• There was still something unfinished around her eyes; she wasn't done yet. She was a story, not an epilogue. And if she chose to narrate her own life one word at a time as she descended the stairs to meet her newest arrival, that wasn't hurting anyone. Narration was a hard habit to break, after all. Sometimes it was all a body had.

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• None of this is real, my dear. Not this house, not this conversation, not those shoes you're wearing--which are several years out of style if you're trying to reacclimatize yourself to the ways of your peers, and are not proper mourning shoes if you're trying to hold fast to your recent past--and not either one of us. 'Real' is a four-letter-word, and I'll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.

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• Hey! I turned, crossing my arms and glaring. I was talking to him!Tybalt eyed me with amusement, which just made me glare harder. No, you were inciting him to stab you with a toothpick. Again, the difference is small, but I think it matters.

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• Sometimes, when it seems like the pain is never going to end, I wish I'd gotten a different suite of magical talents from my mother. Like the power to avoid situations that end with me willingly jamming my arm into a door made entirely from animate, apparently angry rose briars.

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• If it had been my decision, you would still be sleeping, and I would be hoping every hour of every night you lived was filled with the foulest of dreams.—"My only nightmare in this moment is the quality of the mattress you saw fit to place me on," said Simon. —Really, brother, have you never heard of lumbar support?

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• Brenna Kelly, meet Alice Price-Healy. Grandma, meet Breanna. No one is shooting, stabbing or immolating anyone in this hotel room.Please, added Dominic. I have to sleep here.HAIL! Rejoiced the mice. HAIL THE LACK OF STABBING, SHOOTING AND FLAME!

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• This isn't an army marching on the Mists. This isn't a case you have to solve. It's just a bunch of nobles coming to puff their chests out at each other an try to look important. Do what I do. Bring popcorn.

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• I think the rules where different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn't care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.

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• Why does Eleanor let you have that much acid? he asked. Why would you want that much acid? You don't need that much acid.Except that it appears I do, since I have just enough to dissolve a human body, and we have a human body in need of dissolving, said Jack. Everything happens for a reason. And Eleanor didn't 'let' me have this much acid. I sort of collected it on my own. For a rainy day.What were you expecting it to rain? said Christopher. Bears?

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• Anyone who thinks cryptozoology is the study of the impossible has never really taken a very good look at the so-called natural world. Once you get past the megamouth sharks, naked mole rats, and spotted hyenas, then the basilisks, dragons, and cuckoos just don't seem that unreasonable. Unpleasant, yes, but unreasonable? Not really.

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• I really don't think you should put your hand inside the manticore, dear. You don't know where it's been. — Enid Healy

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• I am so tired of this gothic crap,— I muttered. —Just once, I want to meet the villain in a cheerful, brightly lit room. Possibly one with kittens.

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• In the interests of friendship, I hope you'll forgive me what I'm about to do.—"Forgive you wha" "My sentence was cut off as he clamped his mouth over mine, kissing me deeply...."Ready to make a scene?"He raised an eyebrow. "Do I have a choice?—"Not really. To quote something someone said to me recently, in the interests of friendship, I hope you'll forgive what I'm about to do." I drew back my hand and slapped him across the face. The smack of flesh striking flesh echoed through the hall. Conversations stopped as people whipped around to stare at us. Raising my voice to something just below a shout, I snarled, —You asshole!

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• If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.

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• Time resumed. Time had a way of doing that.

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• Hope means you keep holding on to things that won't ever be so again.

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