"The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope."
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"...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."
— Robin McKinley (The Blue Sword)

"[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 (The Blue Sword)

"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. "
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"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."
— Robin McKinley (Rose Daughter)

"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

"He laughed, tried to make it into a cough, inhaled at exactly the wrong moment, and then really did cough."
— Robin McKinley (The Hero and The Crown)

"He will apologize, or I'll give him a lesson in swordplay he will not like at all."
— Robin McKinley

"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 (Sunshine)

"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."
— Robin McKinley (Dragonhaven)

"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 (Sunshine)

"The story is always better than your ability to write it."
— Robin McKinley

"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 (The Blue Sword)

"One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you've turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying -- trying as hard as you can -- which is a good thing."
— Robin McKinley

"The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?"
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"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 (Sunshine)

"Can't all beasts be tamed?"
— Robin McKinley

"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 leasing 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 (Sunshine)

"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."
— Robin McKinley (The Hero and the Crown)

"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 its thorns may be."
— Robin McKinley (The Door in the Hedge)

"And if my choice is to sit graciously in my best robes and accept the inevitable or to bail a sea with a bucket, give me the bucket."
— Robin McKinley (Chalice)

"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.)"
— Robin McKinley (Dragonhaven)

"Life is Great"
— Robin McKinley

""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 (Dragonhaven)

"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)

"Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters."
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"Vampire. Dangerous. Unknowable. Seriously creepy. This one's name was Constantine. We'd met before."
— Robin McKinley

"We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses."
— Robin McKinley (The Hero and the Crown)

"I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?"
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"'Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'

'It doesn't, really...Somewhere where it all balances out-don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live?-if we could go there, you could see it doesn't.It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.'"
— Robin McKinley (Spindle's End)

"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

"When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them."
— Robin McKinley

"If you wish, I shall go personally to your City and knock together the heads of Perlith and Galooney."
— Robin McKinley (The Hero and the Crown)

"When they finished laughing they were on their way to being not just friends, but the dearest of friends, the sort of friends whose lives are shaped by the friendship.
"
— Robin McKinley (Spindle's End)

"I'm also old... and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I'm not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever had for me was horses and horseback riding, but I've also been cooking and going for long walks since I was a kid (yes, the two are related), and I'm getting even more three dimensionally biased as I get older — gardening, bell ringing... piano playing... And the stories I seem to need to write seem to need that kind of nourishment from me — how you feed your story telling varies from writer to writer. My story-telling faculty needs real-world fresh air and experiences that create calluses (and sometimes bruises)."
— Robin McKinley

"I almost wish I'd had the forethought to eat a tree myself."
— Robin McKinley

"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 what if there were no one who could do the difficult things."
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"[Gonturan] is a true friend, but a friend with thoughts of her own, and the thoughts of others are dangerous."
— Robin McKinley (The Blue Sword)

"Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not."
— Robin McKinley (Chalice)

"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 (The Blue Sword)

"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 (The Outlaws of Sherwood)

"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 (Sunshine)

"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 (Sunshine)

"He grunted; she recognized it as relief that she wasn't going to nag him further about Tor the Just, who probably wasn't that boring if he could hold off the Notherners for nine days and melt a hole in the hills"
— Robin McKinley (The Blue Sword)

"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

"...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."
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"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 (The Outlaws of Sherwood)

"'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 (The Outlaws of Sherwood)

"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 (Deerskin)

"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 ans 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)