Patricia A. McKillip Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

You fought for your freedom and won a different kind of prison. I will fight for mine—
You can't fight me, Tearle reminded him harshly.
I know. In the placid light, his face looked chilled and very weary. But I can die.

Patricia A. McKillip
The small red eyes regarded him, unblinking. What would you give me for all the wisdom of the world?
Nothing. He turned back to his work. I have heard you know the answers to every riddle save one. That will be the one I need answering.

Patricia A. McKillip
Branches grew from his hands, his hair. His thoughts tangled like roots in the ground. He strained upward. Pitch ran like tears down his back. His name formed his core; ring upon ring of silence built around it. His face rose high above the forests. Gripped to earth, bending to the wind's fury, he disappeared within himself, behind the hard, wind-scrolled shield of his experiences.

Patricia A. McKillip
That's the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it.

Patricia A. McKillip
Love is what we say it is, she said fiercely. That's all I know. That's all anyone knows about it. I'm sorry.

Patricia A. McKillip
He was silent a moment, struggling. He said finally, But you had a right to be angry.
Yes. But not to hurt those I love, or myself.

Patricia A. McKillip
The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.

Patricia A. McKillip
She lies like the moon lies, a different face every night, all but one of them false, and the one true face as barren and hard as stone. Why do you believe her?

Patricia A. McKillip
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
Love and anger are like land and sea: They meet at many different places.

Patricia A. McKillip
I was running from my own thoughts as much as anything. I simply wanted to untangle myself from the web I had touched. A single, sticky, quivering strand of it was all I needed to warn me away. I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.

Patricia A. McKillip
Wisdom never learned silence, and it is most annoying when least wanted.

Patricia A. McKillip
Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

Patricia A. McKillip
I didn't know anymore what love meant, or why we were not all better off without it.

Patricia A. McKillip
At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over, in many ways, through centuries. Fantasy changes with the changing times, and yet it is still the oldest kind of tale in the world, for it began once upon a time, and we haven't heard the end of it yet.

Patricia A. McKillip
Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason.

Patricia A. McKillip
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
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
Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere between earwigs and toe mold.

Patricia A. McKillip
Perhaps there had never been anything at all to see.

Patricia A. McKillip
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
Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart.

Patricia A. McKillip
The Riddle Master himself lost the key to his own riddles one day, he said in his deep, reed-pure voice, and he found it again at the bottom of his heart.

Patricia A. McKillip
Do you care for me at all? Or do you only need me?

Patricia A. McKillip
Peace, tremulous, unexpected, sent a taproot out of nowhere into Morgan's heart.

Patricia A. McKillip
I do not want to choose which one of you I must love or hate. Here, I am free to do neither. I want no part of your bitterness.

Patricia A. McKillip
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
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
Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.

Patricia A. McKillip
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