Sleep No More Quotes

“Courage isn’t knowing everything will be fine. It’s knowing everything might not be, and doing what needs to be done anyway, because someone has to.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“Romantic love is not required to live a full and happy life, my seedlings,” Father had told us, watching carefully to be sure we took his message to heart, “but if you cannot love one who loves you truly in return, find friends, find companions, find people who will tell you the truths you cannot carry and unveil the lies you cannot see. Most of all, cleave to each other, for you will be the only sure support you have in all this world.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“Oberon had spent the entire spell locked in with Poppy, and now flinched when people mentioned mortal television in his presence. Served him right.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“I was pretty sure she wouldn’t mean to. She was just so accustomed to everyone knowing who she was and why they needed to be afraid of her that she didn’t stop to think before she spoke. And I would not be the one telling her that. People who criticize the Firstborn don’t tend to have long and healthy lives. People who criticize Maeve’s Firstborn, when the ones we remember at all tend to have been immortalized as monsters, well . . . I have to assume that would be even worse.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“When the Queens Ride, it’s to carry sacrifices to the Heart of Faerie. They used to go down the oldest and longest roads once every seven years, and come back with their company reduced by one, until fair Titania grew jealous of her sister, and asked her oldest daughter to find a way to break the Ride. So she did, and Maeve was lost to us, and the sacrifices stopped. When my brother Rode, it was intentional mockery of the Queens, to spite Titania for having failed to control her children, to shame our mother for being unwilling to help him. There are other Rides, but in the end, a Ride, a true Ride, is always a sacrifice.” She looked at me levelly. “Someone always pays.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“I’m sorry you remember a different world, one where I was apparently a different person, but I live in this world, and in this world, I don’t antagonize royalty.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“Dryads and their kin just kept cropping up, didn’t they?”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“Faerie creates only what she needs, and for August’s sake, Faerie needed me.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“I have never had a head for survival. Mother has made sure I knew that well and truly.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“Now I found that I had all these little whirling bits of information hanging at the edges of my thoughts, telling me things about refrigerators, like that the light inside would go off when I closed the door. Why did I need to know that? Why did anyone need to know that? Did cheese prefer to sit in the dark?”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“Titania had tried to create perfection, but she could never have succeeded, because this was perfection, flaws and all. Anything else would have been a lie.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“I’d learned that I was easy to placate with the promise of a place and people who would at least pretend to love me. But then, I’d always known that about myself, on some level.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“I appreciate it greatly, because it’s not over. It’s never over before I say it is.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“The force of their wanting cut channels in the world.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“We are all vulnerable to the things we hear from the people we trust to take care of us, and he’d been a victim of that vulnerability.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“August and Simon were no replacement for a loving family that I’d chosen and assembled entirely by myself.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“She’d been a lot less bossy when she was a tree.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!” —William Shakespeare, Macbeth.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“It was what Father used to call a “desire path” when we went down to the edge of the swamp to see the pixies who nested there; a path that wasn’t made because someone decided to put a path there, but because it was such an easy way to go toward something desirable that people and animals walked that way over and over again, until their feet pounded the earth down and made it harder for things to grow there. The force of their wanting cut channels in the world.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“You’re his child because parentage is so much more than blood. Parentage is showing up and being present, is love and learning and compassion and care.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“I blame the culture we’ve all been complicit in, that I never really stopped to think about too hard, for leaving me unable to defend myself—either practically, since I was never allowed to learn how, or legally.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“You can be a hero no matter where you’re standing in the fray. There are people who need you, and people who love you, and people who would be, quite sincerely, lost without you.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“The man who was holding me gave me a sharp shake, almost as if he’d heard my thoughts, and the pain in my head exploded into radiant agony, and for a little while, consciousness left me as a bad investment.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“Placing a lot of store on luck and a story, aren’t you?” I asked. “Those are the only things I’ve ever placed any faith in at all,” said Li Qin.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More

“Fine, fine,” I said, laughter overflowing my lips and spilling down my chin. If I didn’t cut her off, she could keep listing her desires until they formed a pile tall and untidy enough to reach the stars.”
― Seanan McGuire, Sleep No More