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Top Robin McKinley Quotes

Browse top 144 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Robin McKinley.

Favorite Robin McKinley Quotes

1. "The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped toward. It would be a good flight and a good death. And so I eat their dead things cut up on a pole, dreaming of my last flight." ~ Robin McKinley
2. "The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained." ~ Robin McKinley
3. "So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town--the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them--and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love." ~ Robin McKinley
4. "The Pavilion did not burn by lightening," she said.He hesitated again. "It holds the memory of fire," he said at last. "Lightening is young and strong and thoughtless, but it could also wish to visit the site of some particular victory of one of its kind--as a young soldier recently commissioned might visit the scene of some great battle--" ~ Robin McKinley
5. "And everybody dreams about vampires; we grow up dreaming about them. They're the first and worst monster that lives under everybody's bed." ~ Robin McKinley
6. "Mathin said: "It is best to take your opponent's sash. The kysin mark each blow dealt, but to cut off the other rider's sash is best. This you will do.""Oh," said Harry."You may, if you wish, unhorse him first," Mathin added as an afterthought."Thanks," said Harry." ~ Robin McKinley
7. "...like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?" ~ Robin McKinley
8. "Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters." ~ Robin McKinley
9. "What you describe is how it happens to everyone: magic does slide through you, and disappear, and come back later looking like something else. And I'm sorry to tell you this, but where your magic lives will always be a great dark space with scraps you fumble for. You must learn to sniff them out in the dark." ~ Robin McKinley
10. "She poured the water, arranged some bread near enough the embers to scorch but not catch fire, and looked up at Little John. She was so accustomed to his step, to his bulk, that it took a moment to notice his face; and when she did . . . It was, she thought, rather like the moment it took to realize one had cut one's finger as one stared dumbly at the first drop of blood on the knife-blade. You know it is going to hurt quite a lot in a minute." ~ Robin McKinley
11. "We are all only mortal," said the Master, even more slowly. "We do only what we can do. All the Elemental priests have certain teachings in common: one of them is that everyone, every human, every bird, badger and salamander, every blade of grass and every acorn, is doing the best it can. This is the priests' definition of mortality: the circumstance of doing what one can is that of doing one's best. Only the immortals have the luxury of furlough. Doing one's best is hard work; we rely on our surroundings because we must; when our surroundings change, we stumble. If you are running as fast as you can, only a tiny roughness of the ground may make you fall." ~ Robin McKinley
12. "I said with perfect honest, "I have no intention of trying to take these suckers out by myself, no." ~ Robin McKinley
13. "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." ~ Robin McKinley
14. "we may not like it, but we need human friends, because we have human enemies whether we will or nay." ~ Robin McKinley
15. "No wonder he'd never really finished becoming one of us. We just thought it was because he was half Japanese, and lived in a huge house on the other side of town with a dad who was never home and who none of our parents had ever met. And possibly because he was an arrogant moody stuck-on-himself creepazoid And here he wasn't even a real gizmohead. He was just a grind. And a werewolf." ~ Robin McKinley
16. "Majid gave me a brief dazzling golden stare and then half-lidded his eyes again. I know when my life is being threatened." ~ Robin McKinley
17. "It was of grey stone, huge block set on block;but it caught the sunlight like a dolphin's back at dawn." ~ Robin McKinley
18. "Although when there were too many people around- which there certainly were today- it was hard even to remember to say thank you: all those people were like drowning." ~ Robin McKinley
19. "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." ~ Robin McKinley
20. "This place felt like home; not her home perhaps, but someone's home, accustomed to shelter and keep and befriend its master." ~ Robin McKinley
21. "I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly." ~ Robin McKinley
22. "I get a little cranky with the whole business about kids not having attention spans. This reminds me of the usual business of thinking that the next generation is hopeless. Every generation has said that about every younger generation." ~ Robin McKinley
23. "[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child." ~ Robin McKinley
24. "Vampires do breathe, by the way, but their chests don't move like humans'. Have you ever lain in the arms of your sweetheart and tried to match your breathing to his, or hers? You do it automatically. Your brain only gets involved if your body is having trouble. Fortunately there was nothing about this situation that was like being in the arms of a sweetheart except that I was leaning against someone's naked chest. I could no more have breathed with him than I could have ignited gasoline and shot exhaust out my butt because I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car." ~ Robin McKinley
25. "[Gonturan] is a true friend, but a friend with thoughts of her own, and the thoughts of others are dangerous." ~ Robin McKinley
26. "My books happen. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl 'Write me! Write me now!' But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again. And so I spend a lot of time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying 'Wait for me! Wait for me!' and waving my notebook in the air." ~ Robin McKinley
27. "There had been certain romantic interludes in the past that had included galloping across the desert at night; but he had never abducted any woman whose enthusiastic support for such a plan had not been secured well in advance." ~ Robin McKinley
28. "As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to." ~ Robin McKinley
29. "...there remained a strange formality between them, and her pleasure in his presence felt too much like missing him had felt during the last week." ~ Robin McKinley
30. "So when a dragon is directly over you, well, even if you're me and you're kind of used to it, your medulla oblongata is still telling you 'the sky is falling, you're about to die, run like hell." ~ Robin McKinley
31. "She laughed at him then, because he sounded like a small boy, not like a very large grown-up Beast with a voice so deep it made the hair on the back of your neck stir when you heard it. 'But vegetables are good for you,' she said, and added caressingly, 'They make you grow up big and strong.'He smiled, showing a great many teeth. 'You see why I wish to eat no more vegetables." ~ Robin McKinley
32. "Tell me who you are. You need not tell me your name. Names have power, even human ones. Tell me where you live and what you do with your living." ~ Robin McKinley
33. "Mice are terribly chatty. They will chat about anything, and if there is nothing to chat about, they will chat about having nothing to chat about. Compared to mice, robins are reserved." ~ Robin McKinley
34. "One keeps searching for ease, she did not say, and not finding it, till the memories of no-pain seem only like daydreams." ~ Robin McKinley
35. "She fell asleep, leaning on his chest, and he edged her a little off a particularly painful bruise, leaned his head back against the tree he had propped them up against, and closed his own eyes." ~ Robin McKinley
36. "Beauty: "You called me beautiful last night."Beast: "You do not believe me then?"Beauty: "Well - no. Any number of mirrors have told me otherwise."Beast: "You will find no mirrors here, for I cannot bear them: nor any quiet water in ponds. And since I am the only one who sees you, why are you not then beautiful?" ~ Robin McKinley
37. "She had had insomnia badly when she was fresh from Home.... She had had only occasional bad nights since then. Bad? she thought. Why bad? I rarely feel much the worse the next day, except for a sort of moral irritability that seems to go with the feeling that I ought to have spent all those silent hours asleep." ~ Robin McKinley
38. "Oh,' she said, too bone-weary to pretend: 'I would far rather that I love you as I saw yesterday I do than that I had gone on worshiping you as I did not long since.' And she turned away hastily, and did not see that Little John would reach out to her; and half-running, went to Tuck's cottage, where she could pull on her half-dry clothes, and become a proper outlaw again. At least, she thought, fighting back tears, like this I am Cecil, with a place among friends, and a task to do. I am someone. I wonder if perhaps if I am no longer Cecil, I am no one at all." ~ Robin McKinley
39. "Don't let the title mislead you," Arlbeth told her. "The king is simply the visible one. I'm so visible, in fact, that most of the important work has to be done by other people.""Nonsense," said Tor.Arlbeth chuckled. "Your loyalty does you honor, but you're in the process of becoming too visible to be effective yourself, so what do you know about it?" ~ Robin McKinley
40. "But--no--splendid is not the right word. they are splendid, but they are--they are so friendly. Oh dear!' she said, and looked up at him, half laughing, half embarassed. 'How childish that sounds! But so many of the beatiful things in the rooms beneath us--push you away--tell you to stand back--order you to admire and be abashed. These--these draw you in. These make you want to stay and--and have them for company. Yes, that's right. But I--I am still making them sould like a--like--sort of comfortable, though, am I not? Like a bowl of warm bread and milk and an extra pillos, and that's not it at all. They are not comfortable. Indeed, I feel that if I lived with them for long, I should have to learn to be...better, or greater, myself. If this Queen of the Heavenly Mountain looked down at me from my bedroom wall every day, soon I should have to go looking for the path to her domain. I wouldn't be able to help myself." ~ Robin McKinley
41. "It is not a comfortable passion." ~ Robin McKinley
42. "She was ashamed. She would not--she would not--be frightened of him: he was what he was, and he had made a promise he would keep." ~ Robin McKinley
43. "Galanna's gift, it was dryly said, was to be impossible to please." ~ Robin McKinley
44. "Feeling at peace, however fragilely, made it easy to slip into the visionary end of the dark-sight. 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. " ~ Robin McKinley
45. "At least I was true. My intellectual abilities gave me a release, and an excuse. I shunned company because I preferred books; and the dreams I confided to my father were of becoming a scholar in good earnest, and going to University. It was unheard-of several shocked governesses were only too quick to tell me, when I spoke a little too boldly -- but my father nodded and smiled and said, 'We'll see.' Since I believed my father could do anything -- except of course make me pretty -- I worked and studied with passionate dedication, lived in hope, and avoided society and mirrors." ~ Robin McKinley
46. "It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered." ~ Robin McKinley
47. "I like that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself. Sounded like something out of a self-awareness class, probably with yoga. See what kind of a pretzel you can tie yourself into and press on the understood... I was raving, if only to myself." ~ Robin McKinley
48. "She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent." ~ Robin McKinley
49. "Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you.Can I trust him?What do I have to lose?" ~ Robin McKinley
50. "What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing--a very hard thing... But my darling, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?" ~ Robin McKinley
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Dew moves mountains."
Author: Cameron Conaway

What Did Robin McKinley Talk About?

Thin
Wit
She
Here
Ear
Lit
Hen
Said
Use
Thou
Self
Old
King
Though
Ought
Sin
Hey
Ten
Per
End
Ally
Side
Cause
Tell
Tan
Bee
Hear
Ring
Yes
Used
Light
Wish
Act
Sit
Con
Less
Rid
Eye
Again
May
Does
Era
Round
Low
Los
Able
Hum
Pen
Heart
Rather

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