Slowly, painfully, I let go. It was like prying my own fingers off the edge of the cliff. And that hurt too-particularly the falling part, and not being sure what was at the b

— Robin McKinley

So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town--the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them--and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love.

— Robin McKinley

Swords. That is no phaeton ; that is slaughter.” The Grand Seneca shrugged. “The Master did not protest. And, indeed, what weapon could he have suggested that would suit him any better?” “Fire,” she said. “He would not,” said the Seneca. “You know he would not.

— Robin McKinley

Sylvia wished she could gouge out the look in Origin's stony eyes, and change the course of history. She wished Fathom had been eaten by a sea monster.

— Robin McKinley

The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced.

— Robin McKinley

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?

— Robin McKinley

The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like sticky plaster-dust. (House-cleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to descale your kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if you didn't, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn't have to be anything scary or unpleasant, especially in a cheerful household - magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself -- but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory.)

— Robin McKinley

The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained.

— Robin McKinley

The Pavilion did not burn by lightening," she said. He hesitated again. "It holds the memory of fire," he said at last. "Lightening is young and strong and thoughtless, but it could also wish to visit the site of some particular victory of one of its kind--as a young soldier recently commissioned might visit the scene of some great battle--

— Robin McKinley

There are always cats around Charlie's, but they are usually refugees seeking asylum from the local rat population, and rather desperately friendly.

— Robin McKinley