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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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Robin McKinley
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 16
Author
Novelist
Writer
Warren
Ohio
Jennifer Carolyn Robin McKinley
Humans
Ones
Need
Name
Needs
Names
Even
Living
Tell
Power
Live
Human

More quotes by Robin McKinley

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When they finished laughing they were on their way to being not just friends, but the dearest of friends, the sort of friends whose lives are shaped by the friendship.
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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...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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It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)
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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With the knowledge of her aloneness came a rush of self-declaration: “I will not be nothing.”
Robin McKinley
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Why do you tell me... so much? Luthe considered her. I tell you... some you need to know, and some you have earned the right to know, and some it won't hurt you to know-- He stopped.... Some things I tell you only because I wish to tell them to you.
Robin McKinley
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Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn't be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.
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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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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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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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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Can't all beasts be tamed?
Robin McKinley
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You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.
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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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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...like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?
Robin McKinley
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Vampire. Dangerous. Unknowable. Seriously creepy. This one's name was Constantine. We'd met before.
Robin McKinley
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The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced.
Robin McKinley
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Mice are terribly chatty. They will chat about anything, and if there is nothing to chat about, they will chat about having nothing to chat about. Compared to mice, robins are reserved.
Robin McKinley