Quote

...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: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 16
Author
Novelist
Writer
Warren
Ohio
Jennifer Carolyn Robin McKinley
Doesn
Grain
Oysters
Become
Floor
Pearl
Ever
Sand
Shell
Take
Ocean
Pearls
Like
Asked
Shells
Gets
Quietly
Position
Climb
Bits
Climbs
Oyster

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.
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There are things you don't want to know you can do
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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.
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It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered.
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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.
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If you wish, I shall go personally to your City and knock together the heads of Perlith and Galooney.
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Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.
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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.
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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.
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With the knowledge of her aloneness came a rush of self-declaration: “I will not be nothing.”
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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
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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.
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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.
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I long for another human face just as I fear it.
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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.
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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.
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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
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He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.
Robin McKinley