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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.

Robin McKinley

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Robin McKinley
Age: 71
Born: 1952
Born: November 16
Author
Novelist
Writer
Warren
Ohio
Jennifer Carolyn Robin McKinley
Needs
Doesn
Months
Supply
Stories
Cases
Bags
Find
Days
Six
Firsts
Four
Everywhere
Maugham
Book
Anyone
Material
Somerset
Matter
Gone
Pages
Usefully
First
Reading
Materials
Take
Story
Case
Eccentricity

More quotes by Robin McKinley

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Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.
Robin McKinley
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She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent.
Robin McKinley
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I like that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself. Sounded like something out of a self-awareness class, probably with yoga. See what kind of a pretzel you can tie yourself into and press on the understood... I was raving, if only to myself.
Robin McKinley
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Tell me who you are. You need not tell me your name. Names have power, even human ones. Tell me where you live and what you do with your living.
Robin McKinley
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...but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago something or other or die had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.
Robin McKinley
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Your attitude is perhaps a little unnecessarily rigorous, suggested Jack.
Robin McKinley
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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.
Robin McKinley
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She fell asleep, leaning on his chest, and he edged her a little off a particularly painful bruise, leaned his head back against the tree he had propped them up against, and closed his own eyes.
Robin McKinley
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Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you. Can I trust him? What do I have to lose?
Robin McKinley
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He didn't look insane or inhuman. He did look uncooperative.
Robin McKinley
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What you describe is how it happens to everyone: magic does slide through you, and disappear, and come back later looking like something else. And I'm sorry to tell you this, but where your magic lives will always be a great dark space with scraps you fumble for. You must learn to sniff them out in the dark.
Robin McKinley
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Friends you will have need of, for in you two worlds meet. There is no one on both sides with you, so you must learn to take your own counsel and not to fear what is strange, if you know it also to be true. —Luthe
Robin McKinley
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I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly.
Robin McKinley
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What was new was the fact that, despite my heart doing its fight-or-flight, help-we're-prey-and-HEY-STUPID-THAT'S-A-VAMPIRE number, I was glad to see him. Ridiculous but true. Scary but true.
Robin McKinley
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My kind [vampires] does not surprise easily, he said. You surprised me, this morning. I have thus used up my full quota of shock and consternation for some interval. I stared at him. You made a *joke*. I have heard this kind of thing may happen.
Robin McKinley
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People forgot it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.
Robin McKinley
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As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to.
Robin McKinley
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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. What you have been given is a hard thing--a very hard thing... But my darling, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?
Robin McKinley
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My capacity for invention is flash hot stark, I thought. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras. Pity about the rest of me.
Robin McKinley
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If you wish, I shall go personally to your City and knock together the heads of Perlith and Galooney.
Robin McKinley