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

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”
― Thomas Wolfe, quote from Look Homeward, Angel

“Alf pondered his next move. On the one hand, the savages seemed to be responding reasonably well to “How.” On the other hand they really weren’t making much progress.
At least they’re not eating us, he thought.
Ten seconds went by, then twenty, as Alf looked at the older savage, and the older savage looked at Alf. Finally, out of sheer nervousness, and unable to think of what else to do, Alf raised his right hand again. But this time, just as Alf began to speak, the savage rotated his spear from the vertical to the horizontal, pointing it toward Alf’s chest. Alf stopped in mid “How,” staring at the sharp pink spear tip, inches from his heart.
And the savage spoke.
Poking his spear tip against Alf’s chest, he said: “Can we move this conversation along, old chap? I’m getting frightfully tired of “How.”
― Dave Barry, quote from Peter and the Starcatchers

“The progress of Sybilla though a market was the progress of worker bee through a bower of intently propagating blossoms. Everything stuck. From the toy stall she bought two ivory dolls, a hen whistle, a rattle and a charming set of miniature bells for a child’s skirts: all were heroically received and borne by Tom, henceforth marked by a faint, distracted jingling. From the spice booth, set with delicious traps for the fat purse, she took cinnamon, figs, cumin seed and saffron, ginger, flower of gillyflower and crocus and—an afterthought—some brazil for dyeing her new wool. These were distributed between Christian and Tom. They listened to a balladmonger, paid him for all the verses of “When Tay’s Bank,” and bought a lengthy scroll containing a brand-new ballad which Tom Erskine read briefly and then discreetly lost. “No matter,” said the Dowager cheerfully, when told. “Dangerous quantity, music. Because it spouts sweet venom in their ears and makes their minds all effeminate, you know. We can’t have that.” He was never very sure whether she was laughing at him, but rather thought not. They pursued their course purposefully, and the Dowager bought a new set of playing cards, some thread, a boxful of ox feet, a quantity of silver lace and a pair of scissors. She was dissuaded from buying a channel stone, which Tom, no curling enthusiast, refused utterly to carry, and got a toothpick in its case instead. They watched acrobats, invested sixpence for an unconvincing mermaid and finally stumbled, flattened and hot, into a tavern, where Tom forcibly commandeered a private space for the two women and brought them refreshments. “Dear, dear,” said Lady Culter, seating herself among the mute sea of her parcels, like Arion among his fishes. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which are the squashy ones. Never mind. If we spread them out, they can’t take much hurt, I should think. Unless the ox feet … Oh. What a pity, Tom. But I’m sure it will clean off.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from The Game of Kings

“She seemed fragile like a moonflower – destined to bloom for a single lovely night, and then to fade and fall.”
― Juliet Marillier, quote from Wildwood Dancing

“The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out into the sea and bring back precious things from afar.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

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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.