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: 71
Born: 1952
Born: November 16
Author
Novelist
Writer
Warren
Ohio
Jennifer Carolyn Robin McKinley
Take
Ocean
Pearls
Like
Asked
Shells
Gets
Quietly
Position
Climb
Bits
Climbs
Oyster
Doesn
Grain
Oysters
Become
Floor
Pearl
Ever
Sand
Shell

More quotes by Robin McKinley

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Then marry me. For I love you, and I do not believe there is anything so wrong with you. You are fair in my eyes and you lie fair on my heart.
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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.
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I long for another human face just as I fear it.
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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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Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.
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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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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.
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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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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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Betrayal would be a different sort of sick.
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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.
Robin McKinley
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There are things you don't want to know you can do
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 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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I get a little cranky with the whole business about kids not having attention spans. This reminds me of the usual business of thinking that the next generation is hopeless. Every generation has said that about every younger generation.
Robin McKinley
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Sometimes it is better not to know. Sometimes when you do know you just fold up.
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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Stay a little while longer, and let everyone congratulate you - including the ones who clearly don't want to: in fact, especially the ones who clearly don't want to. You don't have to say anything but 'thank you
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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
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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