Quotes from Every Heart a Doorway

“You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“She was a story, not an epilogue.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“You're nobody's rainbow.
You're nobody's princess.
You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn't broken.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“For us, places we went were home. We didn't care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn't have to pretend to be something we weren't. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“It gets better. It never gets easy, but it does start to hurt a little less.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world, said Sumi. Her voice was suddenly crystalline and clear, with none of her prior whimsy. She looked at Nancy with calm, steady eyes. "Hope hurts. That's what you need to learn, and fast, if you don't want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying 'don't use this word' and 'don't use that word,' but she never bans the ones that really bad. She never bans hope.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Where did you find the whipped cream?” he asked. “You had milk, I had science,” said Jack. “It’s amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“asexual” and “aromantic” were different things. She liked holding hands and trading kisses. She’d had several boyfriends in elementary school, just like most of the other girls, and she had always found those practice relationships completely satisfying. It wasn’t until puberty had come along and changed the rules that she’d started pulling away in confusion and disinterest.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it's better than admitting the journey's over.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Now I know that if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“There was still something unfinished around her eyes; she wasn’t done yet. She was a story, not an epilogue. And if she chose to narrate her own life one word at a time as she descended the stairs to meet her newest arrival, that wasn’t hurting anyone. Narration was a hard habit to break, after all.

Sometimes it was all a body had.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm. If anyone should be kind, understanding, accepting, loving to their fellow outcasts, it’s you. All of you. You are the guardians of the secrets of the universe, beloved of worlds that most will never dream of, much less see … can’t you see where you owe it to yourselves to be kind? To care for one another? No one outside this room will ever understand what you’ve been through the way the people around you right now understand.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“I don’t do that. With anyone.” “You’re celibate?” “No. Celibacy is a choice. I’m asexual. I don’t get those feelings.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“THE HABIT OF NARRATION, of crafting something miraculous out of the commonplace, was hard to break. Narration came naturally after a time spent in the company of talking scarecrows or disappearing cats; it was, in its own way, a method of keeping oneself grounded, connected to the thin thread of continuity that ran through all lives, no matter how strange they might become. Narrate the impossible things, turn them into a story, and they could be controlled.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Real' is a four-letter word, and I'll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“The mountain was as powerful as the tide, just...in a different way.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Because they're the wrong colors, right? Somebody else's rainbow.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“She was a woman with something to protect. That made her more dangerous than they could ever have suspected.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“We don't teach you how to dwell. We also don't teach you how to forget. We teach you how to move on.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Death was precious. That didn't change the fact that life was limited.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Corpses are incapable of offering informed consent, and are hence no better than vibrators.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“You're nobody's rainbow. You're nobody's princess. You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“I think the rules where different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn't care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

“Older than I look, younger than I ought to be. My skin is a riddle not to be solved, and even letting go of everything I love won’t offer me the answer. My window is closing, if that’s what you’re asking. Every day I wake up a little more linear, a little less lost, and one day I’ll be one of the women who says ‘I had the most charming dream,’ and I’ll mean it. Old enough to know what I’m losing in the process of being found.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Every Heart a Doorway

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Popular quotes

“Good only for destruction - has destroyed all that was valuable in the monarchy - is destroying France with daemonic energy - this tawdry, theatrical empire - a deeply vulgar man - nothing French about him - insane ambition - the whole world one squalid tyranny. His infamous treatment of the Pope!”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from The Mauritius Command

“It was 1976.
It was one of the darkest days of my life when that nurse, Mrs. Shimmer, pulled out a maxi pad that measured the width and depth of a mattress and showed us how to use it. It had a belt with it that looked like a slingshot that possessed the jaw-dropping potential to pop a man's head like a gourd. As she stretched the belt between the fingers of her two hands, Mrs. Shimmer told us becoming a woman was a magical and beautiful experience.

I remember thinking to myself, You're damn right it had better be magic, because that's what it's going to take to get me to wear something like that, Tinkerbell! It looked like a saddle. Weighed as much as one, too. Some girls even cried.
I didn't.
I raised my hand.
"Mrs. Shimmer," I asked the cautiously, "so what kind of security napkins do boys wear when their flower pollinates? Does it have a belt, too?"
The room got quiet except for a bubbling round of giggles.
"You haven't been paying attention, have you?" Mrs. Shimmer accused sharply. "Boys have stamens, and stamens do not require sanitary napkins. They require self control, but you'll learn that soon enough."
I was certainly hoping my naughty bits (what Mrs. Shimmer explained to us was like the pistil of a flower) didn't get out of control, because I had no idea what to do if they did.”
― Laurie Notaro, quote from The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life

“She was still thinking of your safety p. 362”
― Jessica Grant, quote from Come, Thou Tortoise

“People in bars are always claiming to be boxers, hoping thereby to ward off attack, like a black snake will vibrate its tail in leaves and try to impersonate a rattlesnake.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Mythologies

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.