100 Quotes by Patricia A. McKillip

She is our moon. Our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl’s eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves.

That’s the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it.

The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea.

Oh... if you were older... It is not a bad thing, itself, but it is a bad thing to be used by men, to have them choose what you must be, and what you must not be, to have little choice in your life. If you were older, you could choose your own way.

Here in Raine, I can walk with the sunlight on my face. I can speak to anyone who speaks to me. I can learn my daughter’s language. I can be called the name I was given when I was born. Here I am no longer my own secret. Will you let me stay?

Only yesterday a young woman came to me wanting a trap set for a man with a sweet smile and lithe arms. She was a fool, not for wanting him, but for wanting more of him than that.

Sorry, he said penitently. It’s a book. I have no common sense around them.

But you must stop playing among his ghosts – it’s stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He’s trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It’s not nice, and it’s not fair.

Morgon, I told you what I am; you could see what dark power I was waking in me – you knew its origins. You knew I am kin to those shape-changers who tried to kill you, you thought I was helping the man who had betrayed you – why in Hel’s name did you trust me?” His hands, circling the gold crown on the skull, closed on the worn metal with sudden strength. “I don’t know. Because I chose to. Then, and forever.