Robin McKinley

“Little John, watching her standing next to her brother, half-glowering in the old Cecil manner and half-comforted by Robin's words, saw for a moment what it had been like for her as Will's litter sister. Some of what she was good at, and some of what she was bad at, as his pupil, came clear to him in that moment; and something else came clear to him too, but he set it aside so quickly that he allowed himself not to recognize it for what it was.”

“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.”

“There are things you don't want to know you can do”

“the touch of evil poisons by the idea of it. Reject the idea, and you've rejected the evil”

“I said with perfect honesty, "I have no intention of trying to take these suckers out by myself, no.”

“My sheets had never been so clean as they had in the past few months. I hardly got them on again before something else happened and I was feverishly ripping them off and stuffing them in the wash with double amounts of soap and all the "extra" buttons pushed: extra wash, extra rinse, extra water, extra spin, extra protection against things that go bump in the night.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We had to go back to the coffeehouse: the Wreck was there. Mel had walked over. Well, I don’t know about walked. He had come over without vehicular assistance anyway.”

“...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.”

“Stay a little while longer, and let everyone congratulate you - including the ones who clearly don't want to: in fact, especially the ones who clearly don't want to. You don't have to say anything but 'thank you”

“Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn't be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.”

“I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.”

“[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.”

“Vampire. Dangerous. Unknowable. Seriously creepy. This one's name was Constantine. We'd met before.”

“One day" she told them, "when you have retired, you will go to live with a family who will love you for your beauty and nothing more, and if you're very lucky there will be children, and the children will pet you and pet you and pet you. Ossin has a list, I think, of such children; he sends his hunting-staff out during the months they are not needed for that work, to look for them, and add names to the list." The fleethounds stared back at her with their enormous dark liquid eyes, and believed every word.”

“Say yes, babe, or I'll spill you off over the Wall next time - got it?”

“All you did was sit there, he said. Why are you so tired?I sat very diligently, she said.”

“Because she was a princess she had a pegasus.”

“I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?”

“Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.”

“Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.”

“Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you.Can I trust him?What do I have to lose?”

“Sometimes it is better not to know. Sometimes when you do know you just fold up.”

“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.”

“Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.”

“The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced.”

“Cigars should be like onions," she said, unfastening the catch and pushing back the pane. "Either the whole company does, or the whole company does not.”

“My capacity for invention is flash hot stark, I thought. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras. Pity about the rest of me.”

“It seems to me further, that it is very odd that fate should leave so careful a trail, and spend so little time preparing the one that must follow it.”

“It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Book-Bag.”

“If you wish, I shall go personally to your City and knock together the heads of Perlith and Galooney.”

“We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses.”

“I almost wish I'd had the forethought to eat a tree myself.”

“And none at all has ridden at the king's side since Aerinha, goddess of honor and flame, first taught men to forge their blades. You'd think Aerinha would have had better sense.”

“He will apologize, or I'll give him a lesson in swordplay he will not like at all.”

“But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leav­ing out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it.”

“It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered.”

“Roses are for love. Not silly sweet-hearts' love but the love that makes you and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the worst your life'll give you and that pours out of you when you're given the best instead.”

“But the world turns, and even legends change; and somewhere there is a border, and sometime, perhaps, someone will decide to cross it, however well guarded with thorns it may be.”

“Can't all beasts be tamed?”

“It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)”

“He laughed, tried to make it into a cough, inhaled at exactly the wrong moment, and then really did cough.”

“The man paused and added with a grin, "He also wishes your porter's head on a silver plate for not opening the gate at once upon his herald's declaration of his visit. This tale of threatening brigands is all very well, but can't I see he's the sheriff?”

“...My friend, there are some things that I cannot tell you. Some I will tell you in time; some, others will tell you; some you may never know, or you may be the first to find the answers.”

“...but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago "something or other or die" had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.”

“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.”

“The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?”

“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. ”

“The big difference between my mom and me-- besides the fact that she is dead normal and I'm a magic-handling freak-- is that she's the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other people's points of view, but she's honest about it. She's a brass-bound bitch because she believes she knows best. I'm a brass-bound bitch because I don't want anyone getting close enough to find out what a whiny little knot of naked nerve endings I really am.”