Top 74 Patricia A. McKillip Quotes
#1. There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.
Patricia A. McKillip
#2. Do you become in visible?'
'No. I'm there, if you know how to look. I stand between the place you look at and the place you see. Behind what you expect to see. If you expect to see me, you do. I listen in places where no one expects me to be.
Patricia A. McKillip
#3. You were crying. It's a terrible thing, loving the sea."
"Yes," she whispered, her eyes straying to it. Waves gathered and broke invisibly in the dark, reaching toward her, pulling back. They were never silent, they never spoke.
Patricia A. McKillip
#4. This palace,' he had said, 'is a small city, past lying close to present like one shoe next to another. If you look at them in a mirror, left becomes right, present becomes past ...
Patricia A. McKillip
#5. Lydea found Mag's knowledge astonishing, and had gotten into the habit of taking lessons with the prince. They helped each other study, sometimes with the aid of puppets.
Patricia A. McKillip
#6. It's an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.
Patricia A. McKillip
#7. The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea.
Patricia A. McKillip
#8. Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored.
Patricia A. McKillip
#10. I thought of you with your hair silver as snow all through that cold, slow journey from Sirle. I felt you troubled deep within me, and there was no other place in the world I would rather have been than in the cold night riding to you. When you opened your gates to me, I was home.
Patricia A. McKillip
#11. Do you want a half-truth or truth?" "Truth." "Then you will have to trust me." His voice was suddenly softer than the fire sounds, melting into the silence within the stones. "Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Trust me." Morgon
Patricia A. McKillip
#12. Only yesterday a young woman came to me wanting a trap set for a man with a sweet smile and lithe arms. She was a fool, not for wanting him, but for wanting more of him than that.
Patricia A. McKillip
#13. The message, which one fall or another of the coin would eventually give him, was how to get himself out of his chamber and into Nepenthe's, so that he could tell her why he had not come to tell her why he had not come.
Patricia A. McKillip
#14. He assumed his stillness like a shield, impervious and impenetrable; she wondered if it hid a total stranger or someone as familiar as to her as his name.
Patricia A. McKillip
#15. He finally took his harp out of the cobwebs, walked out the door, and admitted who he was: the Unforgiven.
Patricia A. McKillip
#16. Here in Raine, I can walk with the sunlight on my face. I can speak to anyone who speaks to me. I can learn my daughter's language. I can be called the name I was given when I was born.
Here I am no longer my own secret.
Will you let me stay?
Patricia A. McKillip
#17. What? It was a good word. Like a rock in a river, sticking up to let you land on it, so you could make your way across the flow.
Patricia A. McKillip
#19. He went into a dark tower of truth for you. Do you have the courage to give him your own name?
Patricia A. McKillip
#20. He is not here to help me with this; you must take his place.'
Ducon started to speak, faltered. He stared at her, the bruise on his face suddenly vivid against his pallor, as if she had struck him.
Patricia A. McKillip
#21. Peace, tremulous, unexpected, sent a taproot out of nowhere into Morgan's heart.
Patricia A. McKillip
#22. How strange to be in a dream one moment and in the world the next, and to know the difference in the blink of an eye.
Patricia A. McKillip
#23. It was no warning, no judgment, simply her name, and she could have wept at the recognition of it.
Patricia A. McKillip
#24. He could think no longer; he leaned against his shadow. The silence within the slab of ancient stone eased through him; his thoughts, worn meaningless, became quiet again.
Patricia A. McKillip
#25. He closed his grade book and asked hopefully, "What inspired you? Was it Hawthorne?"
I stared at him. He had to be kidding.
Patricia A. McKillip
#26. The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.
Patricia A. McKillip
#27. The man was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there
Patricia A. McKillip
#28. Then you will have to trust me. Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope, trust me.
Patricia A. McKillip
#29. All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles.
Patricia A. McKillip
#30. What are the thorns really telling her? It's why she won't let us see them, why she clings to them
or they cling to her
as though she got herself buried in a bramble thicket and she can't get out and we can't get in to free her.
Patricia A. McKillip
#31. If you speak of this I will tear out your voice and top it down the nearest drain
Patricia A. McKillip
#33. I think they could teach us unimaginable things.
Unimaginable! I can't imagine anything except danger.
I know. That's why they're afraid of you.
Patricia A. McKillip
#34. It's so hard to think in winter. The world seems confined in the space of your heart; you can't see beyond yourself.
Patricia A. McKillip
#36. Night is not something to endure until dawn. It is an element, like wind or fire. Darkness is its own kingdom; it moves to its own laws, and many living things dwell in it.
Patricia A. McKillip
#37. Every moment is like a wheel with a hundred spokes in it. We ride always at the hub of the wheel and go forward as it turns. We ignore the array of other moments constantly turning around us. We are surrounded by doorways; we never open them.
Patricia A. McKillip
#38. [Imagination] must be visited constantly, or else it begins to become restless and emit strange bellows at embarrassing moments; ignoring it only makes it grow larger and noisier.
Patricia A. McKillip
#39. The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there. -Cyrin
Patricia A. McKillip
#40. Women hold their councils of war in kitchens: the knives are there, and the cups of coffee, and the towels to dry the tears.
Patricia A. McKillip
#41. He had no place in the world, he said once, therefore he could go everywhere.
Patricia A. McKillip
#42. In that place things begin to wear away even as they are built; the living die a little more each day. The sun is too far away; light slides endlessly into night; fire and love consume themselves; the heart tries to warm itself with ashes.
Patricia A. McKillip
#43. Above us hung a tapestry of silver and gold and palest green that in my world had faded into white: a great oak so entwined with ivy it had died, its bare branches pushing through the leaves like bone. I stared at the roses, wanting to hold my hands to such red, but like the light, they burned cold.
Patricia A. McKillip
#44. I thought that all magic has its price.'
'Magic does,' Faey said. 'But let us consider this an exchange of knowledge. I'll tell you what you want to know and you'll tell me why you want to know it.
Patricia A. McKillip
#45. Explain to me again," he begged," why we are here."
She had told him once before; it had been like listening to a vivid, improbable dream.
Patricia A. McKillip
#46. I would be mute, beautiful, changless as the earth for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King's white house. I would do that for you and no other man inthe relm. But it would be a lie and I will do anything but lie to you - I swear that.
Patricia A. McKillip
#47. She spread her hands. That morning they had been soft as feathers, jeweled, polished, and perfumed. Now they were crisscrossed with blood and dirt, wearing only bruises for jewels
Patricia A. McKillip
#49. You can weave your life so long
only so long, and then a thing in the world out of your control will tug at one vital thread and leave you patternless and subdued.
Patricia A. McKillip
#50. But dear, you hate to sew.
I will be married soon. Lady Thiel says a woman with needlework in her hands is generally assumed to have no other thoughts in her head and can safely harbor any number of improprieties. That will come in handy, especially when I'm married to a wizard.
Patricia A. McKillip
#51. Sorry, he said penitently. It's a book. I have no common sense around them.
Patricia A. McKillip
#52. His face, at once beautiful and feral, revealed no more than the lion's face, which says nothing at all as the lion crouches and waits. It speaks only when it springs.
Patricia A. McKillip
#53. When you put your hands and mind and heart into the knowing of a thing ... there is no room in you for fear.
Patricia A. McKillip
#54. Imagination is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can't be transformed into food for the imagination.
Patricia A. McKillip
#55. Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.
Patricia A. McKillip
#56. The Shadow of the Emperor
The Hooded One
Who unmasked night
Who laid the stars like paving stones
Who rode the Thunderbolt
Down the star-cobbled path into day
Was Kane,
The Emperor's twin
Silent, as lightning is silent,
Before the thunder speaks.
Patricia A. McKillip
#57. But you must stop playing among his ghosts
it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.
Patricia A. McKillip
#58. That once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone.
Patricia A. McKillip
#59. She didn't bother taking off her snow-crusted cloak; she came to us quickly, dripping and shivering, her eyes luminous and strained from trying to see beyond the world.
Patricia A. McKillip
#60. Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.
Patricia A. McKillip
#61. She [Kane] and Axis performed the ancient ritual of flinging their toys at one another's heads, and in that moment recognized a common destiny. They became inseparable.
Patricia A. McKillip
#62. She is our moon. Our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl's eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves.
Patricia A. McKillip
#63. Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.
Patricia A. McKillip
#65. Sorrow was like sleeping on stone,he (Brenden)decided. You had to settle all its bumps and sharp edges, come to terms against them,fit them around until they became bearable, and then carry your bed wherever you went.
Patricia A. McKillip
#67. Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art.
Patricia A. McKillip
#68. A librarian had found the baby sitting abandoned on the sheer edge of the world; the librarians kept her. That proved shrewd. Nepenthe had drooled on words, talked at them, and tried to eat them until she learned to take them into her eyes instead of her mouth.
Patricia A. McKillip
#69. The tutor's eyelids drooped; his thoughts drained out of his face like water seeping into earth.
Patricia A. McKillip
#70. But even in the schoolyard I'd been aware of that silence, that reserve in him, as though he'd been raised by foxes and language was his second language.
Patricia A. McKillip
#71. Once I used my powers. Now I feel like a dancing instructor, reminding the queen whom she is dancing with at this hour and with which foot she should begin.'
'Be thankful,' Gavin advised with a laugh, 'that so far the music is still being played and everyone is trying to dance in harmony.
Patricia A. McKillip
#72. There was the gaudy patch of sunflowers beside the west gate of the palace of the Prince of Ombria, that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun.
Patricia A. McKillip
#73. Winds shook me apart piecemeal, flung a bone here, a bone there. My eyes became snow, my hair turned to ice; I heard it chime against my shoulders like wind-blown glass. If I spoke, words would fall from me like snow, pour out of me like black wind.
Patricia A. McKillip
#74. Something - a flick of color, the faint beat of the earth under my feet, or maybe my name in someone's thoughts - made me lift my eyes.
Patricia A. McKillip
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