5 Quotes by Patricia McKillip

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.

She had begun to bake to have her eyes looking at a bowl, a flour bin, an oven, a fire, a face, anything but water. Her hands shaped loaves like scallop shells, like moon shells, like starfish; she ate them as if she ate the sea, to make it part of her, to transform bone to shell and lose herself in it, eyeless, thoughtless, wrapped in memories and anchored on some hoary rock against the currents of the deep.

Imagination must be visited constantly, or else it begins to become restless and emit strange bellows at embarrassing moments; ignoring it only makes it grow larger and noisier.

I write fantasy because it's there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places.

Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art.