“When Rome burned, the emperor's cats still expected to be fed on time.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Cats never listen. They’re dependable that way; when Rome burned, the emperor’s cats still expected to be fed on time.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“We have to burn brightly. We can’t burn forever”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“There weren’t any fairy tales in the streets around me. If there was ever a Cinderella, her glass slippers shattered under her weight and she limped home bleeding from the ball.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Time never runs backward when I need it to. Not for me, and not for anyone else.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Hello?” I peered into the shadows.
Two green circles flashed in the dark. I yelped, jumping backward and pressing myself against the wall.
“And may I wish a very good morning to you, too, October.” The voice was amused, underscored by a chuckle like thick cream. “What happened? Did the prettiest little princess miss her carriage home?”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“My manners have always been the first thing to go when I get upset, and some people say that they stopped coming back a long time ago.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Humans have always preferred to live their lives by daylight. I used to think it was because human beings have crappy night vision, and it wasn't until I got older and more cynical that I realized it was because they have less to be afraid of during the day.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“She laughed like she'd just invented laughter.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“My name is October Christine Daye; I live in a city by the sea where the fog paints the early morning, parking is more precious than gold, and Kelpies wait for the unwary on street corners. Neither of the worlds I live in is quite mine, but no one can take them away from me. I did what had to be done, and I think I may finally be starting to understand what's important. It's all about finding the way home, wherever that is. I plan on finding out.
I have time.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Rose goblins are built like porcupines - if you rub them the right way, you don't have to worry about the spines. They're sort of like people in that regard, too.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“That’s where the dreams end: with the realization that it doesn’t matter where I am, whether I think I’m a woman or a fish or something in-between. I’ve never really left the pond. I still can’t breathe.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Never tempt fate. It plays for keeps.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“We hated each other so well and loved each other so badly...”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Past experience told me he could smell my fear; it also told me that the anger accompanying it would pretty much cover the scent. It's good to know how to compensate for your own weaknesses.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Some people live where they work. Others just visit.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“But you're so easy to sneak up on." He crossed his arms, leaning back against the wall. "You should be honored that I bother, since there's no challenge to it."
"Right," I said dryly.
Tybalt has never made a secret of his contempt for changelings in general and me in particular. Not even the years I spent missing could change that. If anything, it made things worse, because when I came back, I promptly removed myself from all the places he was accustomed to finding me. Hating me suddenly took effort - an effort he's proved annoying glad to make. On the other hand, it's actually been something of a relief, because it is something I can count on. Dawn comes, the moon rises and Tybalt hates me.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“It's not hard to marginalize people when they've already done it to themselves.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“I'm not body-shy--it's hard to grow up in the Summerlands, where clothes are solidly optional, and stay body-shy--but that doesn't mean I enjoy nudity. Naked people are, by definition, unarmed.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to visit right now. Maybe you can come back later? I’ll bake you some cookies . . .” Okay, that was it. I hadn’t had a chance to use the kitchen for anything more elaborate than coffee and fried eggs, and I’d be damned if some invading monster was going to beat me to it. I stepped into the living room, bat still held in front of me like a poor man’s broadsword. “You are not using my kitchen.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“He changes when there's a threat to be overcome: it's like he pulls on a second skin, one he almost forgets the rest of the time, and becomes a hero again. A tired, old hero, one who wields a pen instead of a sword and rides waves of paperwork rather than a white charger, but still a hero.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“I've never liked being looked at like I was a hero. I always wind up letting someone down. Sometimes I get lucky. Sometimes the only person who gets hurt is me.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“We came here because no place would take us after our momma died. They all said go away, come back when you're older, when you know better, when you've learned. Only no one wants to teach how to be older or to know better - not even Devin. They just teach us how to be broken.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Changing clothes in a public restroom is an acquired skill, one that becomes an art when the bathroom floor hasn't been washed in a decade or more.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“I haven't visited Evening's building since 1987. From what I could see, it hadn't changed a bit--the place stank of elegance and the sort of timelessness that only money can buy. Stasis is one of the benefits of being very, very rich. Nothing ever changes unless you let it.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Promises bind our kind as surely as iron chains or ropes of human hair. The fae never swear by anything we don't believe in. We don't ask for thanks and we don't offer them; no promises, no regrets, no chains. No lies.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“Call me a sucker for a man who had a great ass who knows how to bake a macaroni casserole and can tolerate six hours of Sesame Street a day.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“In Tybalt's case, it means bloody control of the local Court of Cats. He became their king by right of blood; he's held the position by beating the crap out of anyone who tries to take it away. The Cait Sidhe take a more direct and bloody approach to succession than most of Faerie.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
“I love you more than fairy tales.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Rosemary and Rue
Seanan McGuire
Born place: in Martinez, California, The United States
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“WHAT THE LIVING DO
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you. ”
― Marie Howe, quote from What the Living Do: Poems
“...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Reading Life
“Little son, I have longed a while to see you, and now I see you the fairest thing ever a woman bore. In sadness came I hither, in sadness did I bring forth, and in sadness has your first feast day gone. And as by sadness you came into the world, your name shall be called Tristan; that is the child of sadness.”
After she had said these words she kissed him, and immediately when she had kissed him she died.”
― quote from The Romance of Tristan
“Hell, Cal. You're a monster that mothers threaten their children with and you're still as touchy as an ugly girl in a pretty dress.”
― Caitlin Kittredge, quote from The Iron Thorn
“The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient
Daniel Martin
The Other Side of Da...
Byzantium
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