Children are natural practitioners of the Queer and the Questing, for childhood is nothing but a quest through a queer country. Of course, they often have a good deal of trouble with the Quiet.

I am a practical girl, and a life is only so long. It should be spent in as much peace and good eating and good reading as possible and no undue excitement. That is all...

I thought that for a long while, but you chose me, and then you chose him, and choosing is hard – one choice is never the end of the story.

A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library...

I try to hurt myself, to sprain something, writing every novel and story, because I’m stretching for something new and difficult that I haven’t done before.

Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil,...

The dude feels right fatherly. Takes her down to the crick to wash the underground off of her. Just can’t bring himself to shoot her while she’s filthy and starving. There’s time. Offers her a...

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.

Let us be greedy together; let us hoard. Let us hit each other with birch branches and lock each other in dungeons; let us drink each other’s blood in the night and betray each other...

Because I’m a cat. A big one, the Panther of Rough Storms, in fact. But still a cat. If there’s a saucer of milk to spill, I’d rather spill it than let it lie. If...

Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the...

At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of...

You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.

The sun hitched up her trousers and soldiered on up into the sky. September squinted at it and wondered if the sun here was different than the sun in Nebraska. It seemed gentler, more golden,...

That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a...

It’s up to you. Everyone should get to choose their own way, and that’s all I mean by yelling. But I shall choose to remember you, and it would be nice if it went both...

I had some peculiar ideas about love. I’ll tell you what I thought on the subject back then: it’s about as much use as a barrel with no bottom. When I fed the pigs and...

It’s not a game if you don’t cheat, it’s just two sods making a mess with fifty-two pieces of paper.

As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.

Such lonely, lost things you find on your way. It would be easier, if you were the only one lost. But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is...

I have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.

… relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting.

These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as...

You poor girl, what sort of aged, unfriendly Libraries have you met in short life? A silent Library is a sad Library … A Library should be full of exclamations! … A Library should be...

I’m very touchy feely with my fandom, in part because they’ve never done me wrong or hurt me in any way. This is an awesome balance. I hope it stays that way forever.

We are. Oh, how alike we are! I feel very warmly towards you, and I only want to protect you, as I wish someone had protected me. Come, September, look out the window with me....

What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up.

But the trouble is, I do want to be surprised. I want to choose. I broke the heart of my fate so that I could choose. I never chose; I only saw a little girl...

I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies of their bodies – and those bodies were so dear to me!

Funny how “question” contains the word “quest” inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars.

In a very real way, television is the new mythos. It defines the world, reinterprets it. The seasons do not change because Persephone goes underground. They change because new episodes air, because sweeps week demands...

And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.

Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.

Monsters almost always are culture’s way of working out their fears.

If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of...

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.

I tell them: don’t depend on a woodsman in the third act. I tell them: look for sets of three, or seven. I tell them: there’s always a way to survive. I tell them: you...

Spring and Summer and Winter all begin with such late letters! But Autumn and Fall, I have loved best, because they are best to love.

What is it, Master Calligrapher, that little girls do in the way that spiders weave?” sleeve asked primly.The Calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and...

Oh, September! It is so soon for you to lose your friends to good work and strange loves and high ambitions. The sadness of that is too grown-up for you. Like whiskey and voting, it...

And hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. There’s power in that, if you’re after power.

Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past.

We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.

I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide a poor...

It seems like every few years a big name author will holler something about how evil, heinous, and morally wrong fan fiction and fan fiction writers are, and then the Internet gets all upset and...

Truly, Mallow yearned to know everything. Curiosity was part of her, like her short blond hair and bitten fingernails.

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For...

All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.

it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one’s stomach than of one’s nation

I will age for you, if it pleases you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, crease for crease, wrinkle for wrinkle. You will be so beautiful when you are...