Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.”
― E. V. Lucas

“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.”
― 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, The Blue Sword

“Why did you come if not to murder my king?"
"I came to steal his magus."
"You can't," said the magus in question.
"I can steal anything," Eugenides corrected him, "even with one hand.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The Queen of Attolia

“If I am the pawn of the gods, it is because they know me so well, not because they make my mind up for me.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The Queen of Attolia

“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, Sunshine

“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, Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast

“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.”
― 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.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“What was she to say? "The prodigal has returned? The mutineer wishes to be reinstated? The subordinate, having gone to a great deal of trouble to prove her commander wrong, has come back and promises to be a good little subordinate hereafter, or at least until next time?”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“If you try to breathe water, you will not turn into a fish, you will drown; but water is still good to drink.”
― Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown

“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.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

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

“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.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“It is not a comfortable passion.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“He didn't look insane or inhuman. He did look uncooperative.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“But their strength is the strength of numbers and of stubbornness and persistence; do not underestimate it.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

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

“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, The Blue Sword

“But he hated to see his people people unhappy--because he was a good king, not because he was a nervous one--”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“...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, The Blue Sword

“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.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“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, The Blue Sword

“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.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“Mathin had taught her patience, and she had known all of her life how to be stubborn.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

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

“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.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“But it is not, as we say when we are being diplomatic, a fruitful source of inquiry.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“Your attitude is perhaps a little unnecessarily rigorous," suggested Jack.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“--including Rilly, who was beside herself with excitement, and her mother, who was beside herself with Rilly--”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword