Rose Daughter Quotes

“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

“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, Rose Daughter

“But it was equally clear to her that this was her fate, that she had called its name and it had come to her, and she could do nothing now but own it.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“They are all so beautiful,' she said.

He looked down at her. 'Not half so beautiful as you are,' he said. 'Nor do they speak to me, nor touch me. Even Fourpaws will not touch me. Beauty, will you marry me?”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“She looked up at once, pierced to the heart by the sorrow in his voice and knowing, from the question and the sorrow together, that he had no notion of what had just happened to her, nor why. From that she pitied him so greatly that she cupped her hands again to hold a little of the salamander's heat, not for serenity but for the warmth of friendship. But as she felt the heat again running through her, she knew at once it bore a different quality. It had been a welcome invader the first time, only moments before; but already it had become a constituent of her blood, intrinsic to the marrow of her bones, and she heard again the salamander's last words to her: Trust me. At that moment she knew that this Beast would not have sent such misery as her father's illness to harry or to punish, knew too that the Beast would keep his promise to her, and to herself she made another promise to him, but of that promise she did not yet herself know. Trust me sang in her blood, and she could look in the Beast's face and see only that he looked at her hopefully.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“What … you’re a hedgehog!” It stirred at her touch and then curled up tighter. “You’re a very small hedgehog. And you shouldn’t be wandering round enchanted palaces looking for adventures.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“There was something very odd about the carpet this morning… More hedgehogs? Many more hedgehogs? Positively a lake of hedgehogs?”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“Roses are for love. Not forget-me-not, honeysuckle, silly sweethearts’ 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

“She was ashamed. She would not--she would not--be frightened of him: he was what he was, and he had made a promise he would keep.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“She wondered if her father had awakened yet, if he had missed her, if Jeweltongue would tell him she was only out in the garden, if Tea-cosy's wretchedness would give them all away immediately. She wondered if she had been right to guess that her father would not mend till she left--and that he would mend when she did. Had the Beast sent his illness? Did he watch them from his palace? What a sorcerer could and could not do could never quite be relied on--not even always by the sorcerer. She could hate him--easily she could hate him--for the misery of it if he had sent it. If he kept his promises like a man, did he suppose that they mere humans as they were, would keep theirs any less? The price was high for one stolen rose, but they would pay it. If he had sent her father's illness to beat them into acquiescence, she would hate him for it.

The bitterness of her thoughts weighted her down till she had to stop walking. She looked again at the beech trees and, not waiting for a gap this time, fought her way through to the nearest and leant against it, turning her head so that her cheek was against the bark. The Beast is a Beast, even if he keeps his promises; how could she guess how a Beast thinkds, especially one who is so great a sorcere? It was foolish to talk of hating him--foolish and wasteful. What had happened had happened, like anything else might happen, like a bit of paper giving you a new home when you had none finding its way into your hand, like a company of the ugliest, worst-tempered plants you'd ever seen opening their flowers and becoming rose-bushes, the most beautiful, lovable plants you've ever seen. Perhaps it was the Beast's near presence that made her own roses grow. Did she not owe him something for that if that were the case? It was a curious thing, she thought sadly, how one is no longer satisfied with what one was or had if one has discovered something better. She could not now happily live without roses, although she had never seen a rose before three years ago.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“She was surprised into looking into the Beast's face.
The contrasts she found there were too great: wisdom and despair, power and weakness, man and animal. These made him far more terrible than any hungry lion, any half-tamed hydra, any angry sorcerer, terrible as something that should not exist is terrible, because to recognise that it does exist shakes that faith in the foundations of the natural world which human beings must have to bear the burden of their rationality.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“I—I don’t know what possessed me to tell the story tonight. I do believe the storm has crept into my head and disarranged all my thinking.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“The thing that tells me when one of the pictures in my head or phrases in my ear is a story, and not a mere afternoon's distraction, is its life, its strength, its vitality. If you were picking up stones in the dark, you would know when you picked up a puppy instead. It's warm; it wriggles; it's alive.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“I've long said my books 'happen' to me. 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 my 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. Rose Daughter happened, but it bolted with me. Writing it was quite like riding a not-quite-runaway horse, who is willing to listen to you, so long as you let it run.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“She had always been the least of the sisters, called Beauty because she had no other, better characteristic to name her as herself.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“But the worst borne is not necessarily past and over with thereby. The worst of fighting a dragon is being caught in its fire, but you do not survive dragon encounters by commanding your muscles to withstand dragon fire, because you and they cannot. You survive by avoiding being burnt.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“I will miss the horses," said Beauty a little wistfully.
"Perhaps you will become fond of the goat," said Jeweltongue. "Or even the chickens."
"Does one ever grow fond of chickens?" said Beauty dubiously. "Perhaps the goat.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“It made her laugh - weeding with her fingernails - and the real weight of the earth comforted her.... She knew this garden would do it’s best for her. It didn’t matter how she knew.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“when you are happy, when you have never been happy before, when you hadn’t even known you weren’t happy, it is hard to believe that it won’t all go away again, isn’t it?”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“If you're a storyteller, your own life streams through you, onto the page, mixed up with the life the story itself brings; you cannot, in any useful or genuine way, separate the two.”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

“Roses are for love. Not silly sweethearts’ 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.… There aren’t many roses around anymore because they need more love than people have to give ’em, to make ’em flower, and the only thing that’ll stand in for love is magic, though it ain’t as good, and you have to have a lot of magic, like a sorcerer.…”
― Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter