Patricia A. McKillip Quotes

Once I used my powers. Now I feel like a dancing instructor, reminding the queen whom she is dancing with at this hour and with which foot she should begin.''Be thankful,' Gavin advised with a laugh, 'that so far the music is still being played and everyone is trying to dance in harmony.
Patricia A. McKillip
The idea of fairyland fascinates me because it's one of those things, like mermaids and dragons, that doesn't really exist, but everyone knows about it anyway. Fairyland lies only in the eye of the beholder who is usually a fabricator of fantasy. So what good is it, this enchanted, fickle land which in some tales bodes little good to humans and, in others, is the land of peace and perpetual summer where everyone longs to be? Perhaps it's just a glimpse of our deepest wishes and greatest fears, the farthest boundaries of our imaginations. We go there because we can; we come back because we must. What we see there becomes our tales.
Patricia A. McKillip
I don't teach lies, but I do not teach all I know is true.
Patricia A. McKillip
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.
Patricia A. McKillip
Shall I add a man to my collection?
Patricia A. McKillip
Be patient, as you must always be patient with new pale seeds buried in the dark ground. When you are stronger, you can begin to think again. But now is the time to feel.
Patricia A. McKillip
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.
Patricia A. McKillip
Kir stood close to his father, watching. He seemed, Peri realized, finally becalmed; already he looked more like his mother, as if he were relinquishing his human experience. He found her looking at him wistfully; he gave her a sea-smile. She swallowed a briny taste of sadness in her throat. Already he was leaving her.
Patricia A. McKillip
That's the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it.
Patricia A. McKillip
I need you to forgive me. And then perhaps I can begin to forgive myself. There is no one but you who can do that either.
Patricia A. McKillip
A librarian had found the baby sitting abandoned on the sheer edge of the world; the librarians kept her. That proved shrewd. Nepenthe had drooled on words, talked at them, and tried to eat them until she learned to take them into her eyes instead of her mouth.
Patricia A. McKillip
What are the thorns really telling her? It's why she won't let us see them, why she clings to them--or they cling to her--as though she got herself buried in a bramble thicket and she can't get out and we can't get in to free her.
Patricia A. McKillip
Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.
Patricia A. McKillip
I thought of you with your hair silver as snow all through that cold, slow journey from Sirle. I felt you troubled deep within me, and there was no other place in the world I would rather have been than in the cold night riding to you. When you opened your gates to me, I was home.
Patricia A. McKillip
A net of words, he said at last, is more powerful than a net of rope.
Patricia A. McKillip
Faey lived, for those who knew how to find her, within Ombria's past. Parts of the city's past lay within time's reach, beneath the streets in great old limestone tunnels: the hovels and mansions and sunken river that Ombria shrugged off like a forgotten skin, and buried beneath itself through the centuries.
Patricia A. 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.
Patricia A. McKillip
I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.
Patricia A. McKillip
I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.
Patricia A. McKillip
You--cannot ever be certain of those you love--that they will not hurt you, even loving you. But to make me certain to love you, will be to take away any love I might give you freely.
Patricia A. McKillip
If you have no faith in yourself, then have faith in the things you call truth. You know what must be done. You may not have courage or trust or understanding or the will to do it, but you know what must be done. You can't turn back. There is now answer behind you. You fear what you cannot name. So look at it and find a name for it. Turn your face forward and learn. Do what must be done.-Deth to Morgon, Prince of Hed-
Patricia A. McKillip
...that once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone.
Patricia A. McKillip
Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.
Patricia A. McKillip
The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.
Patricia A. McKillip
I wish you were small again, so I could hold you in my arms and comfort you. But you are grown, and you know that for some things there is no comfort.
Patricia A. McKillip
Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.
Patricia A. McKillip