Kelly Link > Quotes

“A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.”
― Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories

“You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place.”
― Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories

“Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.”
― Kelly Link

“You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It's hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren't quite ready to give up on him yet.”
― Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

“This is the list you carry in your pocket, of the things you plan to say to Kay, when you find him, if you find him:

1. I’m sorry that I forgot to water your ferns while you were away that time.
2. When you said that I reminded you of your mother, was that a good thing?
3. I never really liked your friends all that much.
4. None of my friends ever really liked you.
5. Do you remember when the cat ran away, and I cried and cried and made you put up posters, and she never came back? I wasn’t crying because she didn’t come back. I was crying because I’d taken her to the woods, and I was scared she’d come back and tell you what I’d done, but I guess a wolf got her, or something. She never liked me anyway.
6. I never liked your mother.
7. After you left, I didn’t water your plants on purpose. They’re all dead.
8. Goodbye.
9. Were you ever really in love with me?
10. Was I good in bed, or just average?
11. What exactly did you mean, when you said that it was fine that I had put on a little weight, that you thought I was even more beautiful, that I should go ahead and eat as much as I wanted, but when I weighed myself on the bathroom scale, I was exactly the same weight as before, I hadn’t gained a single pound?
12. So all those times, I’m being honest here, every single time, and anyway I don’t care if you don’t believe me, I faked every orgasm you ever thought I had. Women can do that, you know. You never made me come, not even once.
13. So maybe I’m an idiot, but I used to be in love with you.
14. I slept with some guy, I didn’t mean to, it just kind of happened. Is that how it was with you? Not that I’m making any apologies, or that I’d accept yours, I just want to know.
15. My feet hurt, and it’s all your fault.
16. I mean it this time, goodbye.”
― Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

“There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There's the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little crammed cars. Zombies weren't much of anything. They didn't carry musical instruments and they didn't care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.)”
― Kelly Link, The Living Dead

“Nobody tells her to shut up. It would be pointless. Amy has a large heart and an even larger mouth. When it rains, Amy rescues worms off the sidewalk. When you get tired of having a secret, you tell Amy.
Understand: Amy isn't that much stupider than anyone else in the story. It's just that she thinks out loud.”
― Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters

“Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.”
― Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

“The Customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an asshole. That's the first rule of retail.”
― Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

“The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you.”
― Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

“Tell me which you could sooner do without, love or water.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, could you live without love, or could you live without water?”
“Why can’t I have both?”
― Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

“The boy is loved. The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough to prevent this. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it?”
― Kelly Link, Get in Trouble: Stories

“Whether or not [a] story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl. A girl or a monster or both. Not everyone in a story gets a happy ending. Not everyone who reads a story feels the same way about how it ends. And if you go back to the beginning and read it again, you may discover it isn't the same story you thought you'd read. Stories shift their shape.”
― Kelly Link

“The world is a dangerous place, full of people who don’t trust each other. This is why I am staying up in this tree.”
― Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

“What Jeremy likes about showers is the way you can stand there, surrounded by water and yet in absolutely no danger of drowning, and not think about things like whether you fucked up on the Spanish assignment, or why your mother is looking so worried.”
― Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories

“Everyone who is alive has a ghost inside them, don’t they?”
― Kelly Link, Get in Trouble: Stories

“Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you.”
― Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

“She knows, every part of her knows, that she wants to kiss him. That he wants to kiss her. All of her skin prickles with longing. Her insides fizz. (The Lady and the Fox)”
― Kelly Link, My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

“Because love isn’t just love. It’s all the other stuff, too.”
― Kelly Link, Get in Trouble: Stories

“Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen the Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.”
― Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

“When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day.”
― Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories

“No wizard has ever made himself useful by magic, or, if they've tried, they've only made matters worse. No wizard ever stopped a war or mended a fence. It's better that they stay in their marshes, out of the way of worldly folk like farmers and soldiers and merchants and kings.”
― Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories

“On old maps, cartographers would draw strange beasts around the margins and write phrases such as "Here be dragons." That's where monsters exist: in the unmapped spaces, in the places where we haven't filled in all the gaps...”
― Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant

“You should never poison a witch.”
― Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

“I hate those movies, those books, where some guy gets to go off and have adventures and meanwhile the girl has to stay home and wait. I'm a feminist. I subscribe to Bust magazine, and I watch Buffy reruns. I don't believe in that kind of shit.”
― Kelly Link

“What happens when you get to the end of the world? Sometimes you find a party. This party has been going on for a long time. There is music, lights, people drinking and dancing. Strange things happen at these parties. It is the end of the world, after all.”
― Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

“Her chest feels very tight, as if she's suddenly full of poison. You have to keep it all inside. Like throwing yourself on a bomb to save everyone else. Except you're the bomb.”
― Kelly Link, Get in Trouble

“Charley looked like someone from a Greek play, Electra, or Cassandra. She looked like someone had just set her favorite city on fire.”
― Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

“Bigger things, engaged in their own affairs, their own concerns, never notice when in consequence smaller things are made to suffer.”
― Kelly Link, The Book of Love

“Wizards are always hungry.”
― Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories