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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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Robin McKinley
Age: 71
Born: 1952
Born: November 16
Author
Novelist
Writer
Warren
Ohio
Jennifer Carolyn Robin McKinley
Bits
Climbs
Oyster
Doesn
Grain
Oysters
Become
Floor
Pearl
Ever
Sand
Shell
Take
Ocean
Pearls
Like
Asked
Shells
Gets
Quietly
Position
Climb
More quotes by Robin McKinley
But the world turns, and even legends change and somewhere there is a border, and sometime, perhaps, someone will decide to cross it, however well guarded its thorns may be.
Robin McKinley
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.
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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.
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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
Your attitude is perhaps a little unnecessarily rigorous, suggested Jack.
Robin McKinley
[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.
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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?
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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
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.
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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
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
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
He grunted she recognized it as relief that she wasn't going to nag him further about Tor the Just, who probably wasn't that boring if he could hold off the Notherners for nine days and melt a hole in the hills.
Robin McKinley
I love you. I will love you till the stars crumble, which is a less idle threat than is usual to lovers on parting.
Robin McKinley
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
I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.
Robin McKinley
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
Beauty: You called me beautiful last night. Beast: You do not believe me then? Beauty: Well - no. Any number of mirrors have told me otherwise. Beast: You will find no mirrors here, for I cannot bear them: nor any quiet water in ponds. And since I am the only one who sees you, why are you not then beautiful?
Robin McKinley
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
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