Where the Drowned Girls Go Quotes

“A Jack-o'-lantern might be beautiful, but it was still something that had been cut open and hollowed out because someone wanted it to suit their idea of what a pumpkin ought to be. It wasn't its own self anymore”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“I never wanted to be a hero, but that doesn't mean I'll let you turn me into a villain”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“The people here think they're helping us. They think they're heroes and we're monsters, and because they believe it all the way down to the base of them, they can do almost anything and feel like they're doing the right thing”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“Names have power. Names define things”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“It was funny how "real" history seemed to be all about white men doing important things while everyone else barely existed except when they needed to be shown the errors of their ways. It made sense that the self-made heroes would have written history to make them look as good as possible. It didn't make sense for everyone else to be expected to believe it. It was like saying water was dry and the sky was red, and somehow making that the law of the land”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“Heroism is addictive. Maybe that's why it sounds so much like heroin. [Sumi Ohashi]”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“I am not your door.' After a pause for thought, she added, 'But I might be my own.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“There was nothing wrong with any part of her. She was healthy, and happy, and fat, something which everyone who met her was quick to point out, some in tones of gleeful disgust, others in tones of shameful condemnation. Did she not know that she was fat, perhaps? Had she missed that essential fact of her own physical reality, and needed it explicitly explained to her? There was nothing wrong with her, but she was smart enough to know that everything was wrong with her, and even the fact that her parents and her doctors said that dieting would only do her harm didn’t change the fact that if she didn’t find a way to magically become thin, she would never be accepted.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“If they are being locked, they are being locked. We don't have a key."
"Sometimes, you don't need a key", said Sumi. Her smile verged on feral. "Sometimes, a crowbar is good enough.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“Cameras could lie even when they told the exact truth. Because cameras couldn't record everything, only the surface.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“You … you are a monster,” said Cora, almost wonderingly. “You’re hurting the people you say you’re trying to help. You’re a monster in a hall of heroes, and we’re going to defeat you. That’s what heroes do. We beat monsters, no matter how much it costs us.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“Some children find themselves walking in the broken spaces of their own experiences, unable to untangle who they were from who they’ve become, unable to find their way fully home”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“It took most of Sumi’s attention to keep herself from interrupting, pointing out how it was funny how “real” history seemed to be all about white men doing important things while everyone else barely existed except when they needed to be shown the errors of their ways.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“Sometimes you don't need a key,' said Sumi. Her smile verged on feral. 'Sometimes a crowbar is good enough.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“I'm not your door, but I might be my own.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“My name is Lord of the Forest”, said the stag.

Regan nodded. Every stag she'd ever met had been named Lord of the Forest, even when there was another stag only a few feet away. Deer didn't understand irony.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“They told you to be quiet and constrained and obedient, didn’t they? That’s virtually the same thing. The doors want wild things. They want feral beasts in the skin of dutiful daughters—and you can’t sit here, with your neatly brushed hair and your tidy uniform and tell me you don’t know what it is to be feral. I know you too well for that.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“She might not know where home was anymore, but she knew she wanted to be there. She knew she wanted to wrap it around herself and let it carry her away.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“It can be difficult to find the places where fiction ends and fact begins, but perhaps that's imply a part of the process of traveling, or visiting places where the customs and cultures and laws of physical reality are different than they are here”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“None of the matrons were approaching. They seemed to have a sixth sense for the difference between camaraderie and bullying. The first, they squelched as quickly as possible. The second, they all but encouraged. A student body preoccupied with eating itself alive was a student body that wasn’t making trouble for the administration.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“Sleep was still a lie she told herself every night when she closed her eyes, and like all lies, it always let her down.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“It can be difficult to find the places where fiction ends and fact begins, but perhaps that’s simply a part of the process of traveling, of visiting places where the customs and cultures and laws of physical reality are different than they are here.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“Lots of people go back. They have the right combination of selfish and lonely and hopeful and stupid and earnest and selfless, and they find their doors, and they go back.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“You'll never get better if you run,' said Rowena.
'I'm not getting better now,' said the nameless girl.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“This is a world without heroes. And you're here.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“So pale you could see the veins moving beneath her skin like serpentine bruises, dark and harsh and somehow delicate. They all kept their blood under the surface like that, but most of them hid it a little better.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“Is this a ‘no other gods before me’ somehow turning into monotheism situation?”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“pleasantly dotty in a knee-length rainbow raincoat over a bright peach dress that somehow managed to skirt the color “pink” in all but implication,”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“It took most of Sumi’s attention to keep herself from interrupting, pointing out how it was funny how “real” history seemed to be all about white men doing important things while everyone else barely existed except when they needed to be shown the errors of their ways. It made sense that the self-made heroes would have written history to make them look as good as possible. It didn’t make sense for everyone else to be expected to believe it. It was like saying water was dry and the sky was red, and somehow making that the law of the land.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go

“It took most of Sumi's attention to keep herself from interrupting, pointing out how it was funny how "real" history seemed to be all about white men doing important things while everyone else barely existed except when they needed to be shown the errors of their ways. It made sense that the self-made heroes would have written history to make them look as good as possible. It didn't make sense for everyone else to be expected to believe it.”
― Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go