Spindle's End Quotes

“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, Spindle's End

“Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic—which was what all magic was—it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that looked more or less the same from day to day and might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody’s knee and purred.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'

It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“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, Spindle's End

“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.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“Tiny fists can hurt quite a lot when they hit you in the face.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“Rosie hated her curly golden hair. When she was old enough to hold minimal conversations, the itsy-bitsy-cutesycoo sort of grown-ups would pull the soft ringlets gently and tell her what a pretty little girl she was. She would stare at this sort of grown-up and say, “I am not pretty. I am intelligent. And brave.” The grown-ups usually thought this was darling, which only made her angry, perhaps partly because she was speaking the truth, although it was tricky to differentiate between “brave” and “foolhardy” at three or four years old.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped toward. It would be a good flight and a good death. And so I eat their dead things cut up on a pole, dreaming of my last flight.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like sticky plaster-dust. (House-cleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if you didn't, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn't have to be anything scary or unpleasant, especially in a cheerful household - magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself -- but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory.)”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“But the uproar this caused was nothing compared with the uproar when Katronia noticed [Rosie] had also cut her eyelashes. Various negotiations (including, finally, such desperate measures as "supposing you ever want to eat again") eventually produced the grudging promise that, in return for Katronia keeping her hair cut short, she would leave her eyelashes alone.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“we may not like it, but we need human friends, because we have human enemies whether we will or nay.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country’s philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically-minded fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were wet.)

Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having once been a hawk, and while magic didn’t take much interest in caterpillars, butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodies like tiny human beings dressed in flower petals. (Fish, which flew through that most dangerous element, water, were believed not to exist. Fishy-looking beings in pools and streams were either hallucinations or other things under some kind of spell, and interfering with, catching, or—most especially—eating fish was strictly forbidden. All swimming was considered magical. Animals seen doing it were assumed to be favourites of a local water-sprite or dangerously insane; humans never tried.)”
― Robin McKinley , Spindle's End

“Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona’s theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic—which was what all magic was—it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that looked more or less the same from day to day and might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody’s knee and purred. Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona’s theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. It was the sort of thing a cat would like a human to think, particularly if it weren’t true.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“Aunt and Katriona kept a few chickens, but the only other domestic animal they had—if either “domestic” or “had” was applicable—was Flinx, their not-a-house-cat. He was presently a fat tortoiseshell puddle sprawled in the sunlight a few rows over. Since he was only crushing a few nonessential greens, which would regrow anyway, they let him be.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“Magicians scorned talking to animals; animal thoughts weren't nearly orderly enough to suit magicians, and were always full of large untidy preoccupations, like sex and death and the next meal.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“Rosie hated her curly golden hair. When she was old enough to hold minimal conversations, the itsy-bitsy-cutesycoo sort of grown-ups would pull the soft ringlets gently and tell her what a pretty little girl she was. She would stare at this sort of grown-up and say, “I am not pretty. I am intelligent. And brave.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“He wasn’t really boring. She just wasn’t in love with him.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“I’m real, too. I just don’t know, real what.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“Fairy godmothers?” said the king dubiously. “We’ll have a time getting that past the court council — and the bishop.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“It was not an easy vocation, being a priest in that country, where magic was vibrantly everywhere, maddening and unquenchable, and the gods were assumed to be a kind of super-fairy except that you never saw them nor were offered any concrete proof of what the priests claimed they had done for you.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“Katriona’s theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. It was the sort of thing a cat would like a human to think, particularly if it weren’t true.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End