Robin McKinley Quotes

“I don't put up with being messed around, and I don't suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that I'm a bitch. Trust me, I can provide character references.”

— Robin McKinley

“As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to.”

— Robin McKinley

“You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.”

— Robin McKinley

“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.”

— Robin McKinley

“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

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

— Robin McKinley

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

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

— Robin McKinley

“I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.”

— Robin McKinley

“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.”

— Robin McKinley

“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

Friends you will have need of, for in you two worlds meet. There is no one on both sides with you, so you must learn to take your own counsel; and not to fear what is strange, if you know it also to be true.
-Luthe

— Robin McKinley

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

— Robin McKinley

“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

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

— Robin McKinley

It goes something like 'There are a lot of ways to be yourself.

— Robin McKinley

“Sungold blew impatiently and began to dig a hole with one foot. She booted his elbow with her toe and he stopped, but after a moment he lowered his head and blew again, harder, and she could feel him shifting his weight, considering if she might let him dig just a small hole.”

— Robin McKinley

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

— Robin McKinley

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

— Robin McKinley

“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

“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

“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.”

— Robin McKinley

“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.”

— Robin McKinley

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

— Robin McKinley

“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.”

— Robin McKinley

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

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

— Robin McKinley

It is not a comfortable passion.

— Robin McKinley

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

— Robin McKinley

“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?”

— Robin McKinley

“The sheep, I guess demented with love, didn't object to this at all. Casimir somehow found time to pull up some grass for it, and it lay down and munched its grass and then chewed its cud like hanging out with dogs [ ... ] was something it always did. Maybe it thought other sheep were boring and that it had finally found its spiritual home.”

— Robin McKinley

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

— Robin McKinley

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.

— Robin McKinley

“She thought, I need no cup. I am Chalice. I am filling with the grief and hurt and fear of my demesne; the shattered earthlines weigh me down; I am brimming with the needs of my people.”

— Robin McKinley

“She wished for Ebono as she wished every time she saw Lrrianay at her father's shoulder, or any pegasus at any bond-mate's shoulder, or any pegasus. Or any time she took a breath, she wished again for Ebon.”

— Robin McKinley

“What this world doesn't have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who *invented* this system?”

— Robin McKinley

“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.”

— Robin McKinley

“The burden she carried was different from yours, and it had worn on her for many years. When I knew her she had forgotten joy, although I believe Arlbeth gave her a little back again.”

— Robin McKinley

“They could at least part with love. It was like Tor to make the gesture; her father, for all his kindness, was too proud-or too much a king; and she was too proud, or too bitter, or too young.”

— Robin McKinley

“When you're feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren't thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week.”

— Robin McKinley

“It is all very well to say that all princesses are good and beautiful and charming; but this is usually a determined optimism on everybody's part rather than the truth. After all, if a girl is a princess, she is undeniably a princess, and the best must be made of it; and how much pleasanter it would be if she were good and beautiful. There's always hope that if enough people believe as though she is, a little of it will rub off.”

— Robin McKinley

“She fell in love with him, and he with her; that's a spell if you like.”

— Robin McKinley

“Golden arrow? And what would we do with a golden arrow? Give it to Alan for a lute string? I could hang it around my neck on a chain, perhaps, and let it stab me in the ribs when I tried to sit.”

— Robin McKinley

I wasn't grateful. You want to talk cranky, coitus interruptus takes me well beyond cranky. My engorged labia felt like they were pressing on my brain-what there was of my brain-and if I didn't get to fuck someone, something, now-a vampire would do-I was going to fucking explode. My cunt ached like a bruise.
Beyond cranky, rather fortunately, doesn't transmute into embarrassment. It transmutes into fury. As my blood pressure began to rearrange itself to a more standard unengorged pattern I was seething.

— Robin McKinley

But she brooded not only about how to tackle her father, but also about what, precisely, she was setting out to do. Test the fire-repellent properties of her discovery. Toward killing dragons. Did she really want to kill dragons? Yes. Why? Pause. To be doing something. To be doing something better than anyone else was doing it.

— Robin McKinley

“I long for another human face just as I fear it.”

— Robin McKinley

“She had courage enough, but little imagination; or she would not have forgotten joy, whatever the weight on her.”

— Robin McKinley

“Fairy godmothers?" said the king dubiously. "We'll have a time getting that past the court council - and the bishop.”

— Robin McKinley

“She'd found she couldn't bring herself to kill any of her bees, which was the system all the northern demesnes used, and so had to get them through the winter somehow. She'd been cold that winter herself, after wrapping up her most exposed hives in all the blankets she had.”

— Robin McKinley

“But her curiosity got the better of her and at last she went back to where she'd left a big shallow basin of milk only the day before ... and found the surface of the milk invisible under a carpet of her bees. "Bees don't drink milk," she said to them. When they lifted and flew away the basin was empty and clean.”

— Robin McKinley