Robin McKinley

“Cannot a Beast be tamed?”

“It was too important a matter, this talking to people, and listening to them, to do it lightly or often.”

“With the knowledge of her aloneness came a rush of self-declaration: I will not be nothing.”

“I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.”

“Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for....”

“Why do you tell me... so much?"Luthe considered her. "I tell you... some you need to know, and some you have earned the right to know, and some it won't hurt you to know--" He stopped...."Some things I tell you only because I wish to tell them to you.”

“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?”

“The lessons she'd been forced to learn were dry spare things, the facts without the sense of them, given in the simplest of language, as if words might disguise the truth or (worse) bring it to life.”

“Galanna's gift, it was dryly said, was to be impossible to please.”

“I love you. I will love you till the stars crumble, which is a less idle threat than is usual to lovers on parting.”

“--including Rilly, who was beside herself with excitement, and her mother, who was beside herself with Rilly--”

“Your attitude is perhaps a little unnecessarily rigorous," suggested Jack.”

“Perhaps it is a human thing, to look upon such beauty and fail to encompass it.”

“But it is not, as we say when we are being diplomatic, a fruitful source of inquiry.”

“My father... raised me to make up my own mind. The way he did this was by yielding to me when I asked, even when I was foolish. I lived through it; and I know my own mind; and he will do what I ask him.”

“This place felt like home; not her home perhaps, but someone's home, accustomed to shelter and keep and befriend its master.”

“Mathin had taught her patience, and she had known all of her life how to be stubborn.”

“There was a certain bitter humor to lying awake wishing for something one cannot have, after lying awake not so long ago wishing for the opposite thing that one had just lost. Not a very useful sort of adaptability, this, she thought.”

“There was, too, a reality to her new life that her old life had lacked, and she realized with a shock that she had never truly loved or hated, for she had never seen the world she had been used to living in closely enough for it to evoke passion in her.”

“He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.”

“But he hated to see his people people unhappy--because he was a good king, not because he was a nervous one--”

“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.”

“HIs riders knew most of this, even if they did not see it with the dire clarity Corlath was forced to....”

“But their strength is the strength of numbers and of stubbornness and persistence; do not underestimate it.”

“He didn't look insane or inhuman. He did look uncooperative.”

“It is not a comfortable passion.”

“No, but I am working up to telling you that there is no possibility of there being done what ought to be done-”

“It had not been a very cheerful journey, not the least for the western excursion into Outlander territory, where a stubborn and pompous old man had refused to listen to the truth; but Corlath had expected what he found and-she thought-saw no use in being discouraged.”

“In fact, she would have added the rider that she wasn't sure it could be done at all, getting to know someone at any succession of such parties, however prolonged.”

“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.”

“the bus timetable sites are all run by an inbred cabal of malicious gnomes. Who don’t speak English. And who don’t count very well either. Or tell time. And they certainly can’t read maps.”

“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.”

“There are stories about "good" vampires like there are stories about the loathly lady who, after a hearty meal of raw horse and hunting hound and maybe the odd huntsman or archer, followed by an exciting night in the arms of her chosen knight turns into the kindest and most beautiful lady the world has ever seen... [...]And the way I see it, the horse and the hound and the huntsman are still dead, and you have to wonder about the psychology of the chosen knight who goes along with all the carnage and the fun and frolic in bed on some dubious ground of "honor.”

“...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?”

“And when I looked up and saw you as you were, in no gaudy robes and bearing no solemn goblet - suddenly I had hope.''I did not see you looking,' said Mirasol.'I did no want you to see,' said the Master.'And I looked away quickly, because I knew the hope was false. I knew - I think I knew - that it was not really about hope, it was about looking at you. And so I looked at Horuld, and at his sword, and reminded myself that they were about to kill me.”

“I knew you'd figure it out," he said. "And I hoped that by the time you figured it out, you would be sufficiently accustomed to the situation for the realization to be less... dispiriting.”

“There's always a nest time,' said the king, 'unfortunately. You just don't know what it's going to be about.”

“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.”

“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--”

“I smiled. "I understand now. But It doesn't matter and you needn't apologize. They have been very kind to me too. Even if we did differ a little about suitable dresses." He considered me a moment, a mischievous light creeping into his eyes, and said: "Was THAT the dress - that night you wouldn't come out of your room?"I grinned and nodded, and we both laughed;”

“Betrayal would be a different sort of sick.”

“What was new was the fact that, despite my heart doing its fight-or-flight, help-we're-prey-and-HEY-STUPID-THAT'S-A-VAMPIRE number, I was glad to see him. Ridiculous but true. Scary but true.”

“I don't believe in fate," she said at last. "But I do believe in... loopholes. I think a lot of what keeps the world going is the result of accidents — happy or otherwise — and taking advantage of these.”

“The insides of our own minds are the scariest things there are.”

“Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic—which was what all magic was—it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that looked more or less the same from day to day and might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody’s knee and purred.”

“But the uproar this caused was nothing compared with the uproar when Katronia noticed [Rosie] had also cut her eyelashes. Various negotiations (including, finally, such desperate measures as "supposing you ever want to eat again") eventually produced the grudging promise that, in return for Katronia keeping her hair cut short, she would leave her eyelashes alone.”

“I said: "He cannot be so bad if he loves roses so much.""But he is a Beast," said Father helplessly.I saw that he was weakening, and wishing only to comfort him I said, "Cannot a Beast be tamed?”

“It was of grey stone, huge block set on block;but it caught the sunlight like a dolphin's back at dawn.”

“we may not like it, but we need human friends, because we have human enemies whether we will or nay.”

“People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.”