Other Rachel > Other Rachel's Quotes

“Think of me sometimes," he returned. "When the snowdrops have bloomed and the snow has melted.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“Vasya felt cold despite the steam. “Why would I choose to die?” “It is easy to die,” replied the bannik. “Harder to live.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“The breath hitched in his throat. His hand caught hers, but he did not untangle her fingers. "Why are you here?" she asked him. For a moment she thought he would not answer, then he said, as though reluctant, "I heard you cry.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“Solovey will take me to the ends of the earth if I ask it. I am going into the world, Alyosha. I will be no one's bride, neither of man nor of God. I am going to Kiev and Sarai and Tsargrad, and I will look upon the sun on the sea.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“With that sapphire, he bound your strength to him, but the magic did what he did not intend; it made him strong but also pulled him closer and closer to mortality, so that he was hungry for life, more than a man and less a demon. So that he loved you, and did not know what to do.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“How? I am a demon and a nightmare; I die every spring, and I will live forever.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“But I had forgotten that the Diné had already suffered their apocalypse over a century before. This wasn’t our end. This was our rebirth.”
― Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning

“Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”
― W.H. Auden

“Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections.”
― Seanan McGuire, Indexing

“Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality.”
― L.R. Knost

“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that 'realistic' literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons."

"A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

“Your head. It’s got its own undertow, you know, and if you swim too deep, it can suck you down. You can’t chase the tide. You need to stay on the shore and let it come to you.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to tell you that everything is going to be fine. I wouldn’t do it even if I was still allowed to lie. Some things are too cruel even for a sea witch. But I will tell you that what’s on the other side of that door is never going to be as bad as the undertow in your own mind.”
― Seanan McGuire, Night and Silence

“I am an archivist. I am a librarian. I collect words because words are the truest and longest-lasting craft in the world.”
― Seanan McGuire, Indexing

“That’s the nature of stories. No one ever gets to know the entire thing. We just get to know the parts we have to deal with right here, right now. Before they rip our throats out.”
― Seanan McGuire, Indexing

“Every good thing you find, no matter how small, is a penny for you to put in your pocket. Gather them close, and treasure them. Someday you'll have a future where you feel rich enough, emotionally, to spend them freely.”
― Seanan McGuire, Indexing

“Here’s the first thing you need to know: all the fairy tales are true. Oh, the specific events that the Brothers Grimm chronicled and Disney animated may only have happened once, in some kingdom so old that we’ve forgotten whether it ever really existed, but the essential elements of the stories are true, and those elements are what keep repeating over and over again.”
― Seanan McGuire, Indexing

“She wanted to be a perfect little princess. All she did was turn herself into a flawed reflection of an ideal she could never achieve.”
― Seanan McGuire, Indexing

“What, you thought that one story was somehow more real than all the others, just because it’s the one that has the most people living in it? Shit, if it worked that way, all the narratives would focus on quantity over quality, and we’d be buried under something featuring rabbits. What we think of as reality is just the tale type that took over longest ago. The others keep fighting back.”
― Seanan McGuire, Indexing

“None of the harvest tales started out as parasites. They were the most powerful pieces of the narrative, once upon a time. We fought back, turned them tame, gave them names and labels that pinned them like butterflies in the textbooks of religious studies professors and folklore teachers all around the world.”
― Seanan McGuire, Indexing

“You're a handsome one, aren't you?" she cooed. "So strong and sturdy. What a good hasp you must have; what a firm sense of your purpose. But you've been holding your place for so long. You can't be expecting to stay closed forever. Why, that isn't fair! The people who put you here don't appreciate you the way I do. They don't understand how difficult it is to be a lock, and do the things you do. I would appreciate you always. I would never leave you alone in the rain to rust."

"Are we watching a woman try to seduce a lock?" asked Andrew. "I'm not objecting if we are -- your kink is okay and all -- but I just want to confirm that everyone else is seeing what I'm seeing, here."

The lock clicked as it released, popping open.

"No, we're watch a woman successfully seduce a lock, said Jeffery. "Fascinating."

"Her love life must involve a lot of handcuffs," I said, earning myself a snort from Ciara as she reached out and removed the padlock from its place on the door.

"Don't ask about mine and I won't ask about yours," she said, making the lock disappear into her pocket.”
― Seanan McGuire, Reflections

“In aeternum felicitas vindactio. Defending happily ever after.”
― Seanan McGuire, Reflections

“Honey, if you’re telling me David Bowie is somewhere in this maze, I may forget that I’m a married man,” said Andy, and followed Carlos into the wall. That”
― Seanan McGuire, Reflections

“His sophomore Creative Writing class was as silent as a room full of teenagers could be, only whispering and shuffling a little as they tried to complete their papers. This wasn’t one of the “easy A” electives, and he usually got the kids who were serious about the idea of being better writers. Half of them just wanted to get better so they could improve their Pacific Rim hurt/comfort fanfic, but there was nothing wrong with that. Besides, one of them had let slip that a good portion of the class was posting on Archive of Our Own, and he’d spent a few nights with a beer in his hand, learning more about his students. He hadn’t read the NC-17 pieces—there were professional limits—and yet he felt he respected them more as writers because he’d seen what they were capable of when they weren’t being graded.”
― Seanan McGuire, Reflections

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye! and what then?”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae from the Unpublished Note-Books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“I believe in love at first sight…
But it’s not the first moment you lay eyes on a person, it’s the moment you first see the person they truly are.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“DETECTION HAS MANY METHODS, MANY PATHWAYS, NARROW AND subtle. Fingerprints. The lost piece of thread. The dog barking in the night. But there is also Google.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Vanishing Stair