275 Quotes by Robin McKinley

I’m real, too. I just don’t know, real what.

So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town – the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them – and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love.

Vampire. Dangerous. Unknowable. Seriously creepy. This one’s name was Constantine. We’d met before.

What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task.

The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose.

It doesn’t matter if I’m only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months’ supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham’s story “The Book-Bag.

Water – plain water from the Ladywell – and a spoonful of honey, Master.” She was sure – she was almost sure – she did not imagine it that he smiled. And it was only after her answer that she felt him begin to draw the cup toward himself. Still he did not – or could not – bear its weight, and so she carried it for him. Together they made only a faint gesture of holding it above his head, for the audience to see; and then she tipped it gently against his mouth, and saw him drink.

This place felt like home; not her home perhaps, but someone’s home, accustomed to shelter and keep and befriend its master.

And none at all has ridden at the king’s side since Aerinha, goddess of honor and flame, first taught men to forge their blades. You’d think Aerinha would have had better sense.