The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Robin McKinley

She thought, I need no cup. I am Chalice. I am filling with the grief and hurt and fear of my demesne; the shattered earthlines weigh me down; I am brimming with the needs of my people.

devotion, earth-mother, empowerment, identity, self-realization

When you’re feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren’t thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week.

busyness, coping, food, life, life-lessons, worry

I wondered what you’d have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?

I like that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself. Sounded like something out of a self-awareness class, probably with yoga. See what kind of a pretzel you can tie yourself into and press on the understood… I was raving, if only to myself.

boundaries, humor, self-awareness, yoga

It seems to me further, that it is very odd that fate should leave so careful a trail, and spend so little time preparing the one that must follow it.

Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn’t be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.

adventure, night

The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained.

gossip, mystery, sunshine, unexplained

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you’re scared enough. I was scared enough.

afraid, fear, scared, self, yourself

It’s funny, because I had thought, living through those first two months after the night at the lake, that the great crisis was about What I Was or Who I’d Become or What Terrible Thing Was Wrong With Me (and About to Go Wronger) and Why All Was Changed As a Result. But I was still struggling against the idea that all was changed.

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.

be-prepared, bibliomania, travel

[the sheep] sidled up beside him and bumped him lovingly with its head. Val looked at it sadly. “I am sorry, you ugly creature,” he said. “I have not used my magic in a long time, and I am very out of practice.

humor, magic, sheep

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.)