Every Heart a Doorway Quotes

“We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“She was a story, not an epilogue.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“You're nobody's rainbow.
You're nobody's princess.
You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan mcguire , Every Heart a Doorway

“Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn't broken.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“For us, places we went were home. We didn't care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn't have to pretend to be something we weren't. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“It gets better. It never gets easy, but it does start to hurt a little less.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world," said Sumi. Her voice was suddenly crystalline and clear, with none of her prior whimsy. She looked at Nancy with calm, steady eyes. "Hope hurts. That's what you need to learn, and fast, if you don't want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying 'don't use this word' and 'don't use that word,' but she never bans the ones that really bad. She never bans hope.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Now I know that if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“asexual” and “aromantic” were different things. She liked holding hands and trading kisses. She’d had several boyfriends in elementary school, just like most of the other girls, and she had always found those practice relationships completely satisfying. It wasn’t until puberty had come along and changed the rules that she’d started pulling away in confusion and disinterest.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it's better than admitting the journey's over.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“She was a woman with something to protect. That made her more dangerous than they could ever have suspected.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“There was still something unfinished around her eyes; she wasn’t done yet. She was a story, not an epilogue. And if she chose to narrate her own life one word at a time as she descended the stairs to meet her newest arrival, that wasn’t hurting anyone. Narration was a hard habit to break, after all.

Sometimes it was all a body had.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Where did you find the whipped cream?” he asked. “You had milk, I had science,” said Jack. “It’s amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Real' is a four-letter word, and I'll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“We don't teach you how to dwell. We also don't teach you how to forget. We teach you how to move on.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“The mountain was as powerful as the tide, just...in a different way.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“THE HABIT OF NARRATION, of crafting something miraculous out of the commonplace, was hard to break. Narration came naturally after a time spent in the company of talking scarecrows or disappearing cats; it was, in its own way, a method of keeping oneself grounded, connected to the thin thread of continuity that ran through all lives, no matter how strange they might become. Narrate the impossible things, turn them into a story, and they could be controlled.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“I don’t do that. With anyone.” “You’re celibate?” “No. Celibacy is a choice. I’m asexual. I don’t get those feelings.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“I am a genius of infinite potential and highly limited patience. People shouldn’t try me so.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm. If anyone should be kind, understanding, accepting, loving to their fellow outcasts, it’s you. All of you. You are the guardians of the secrets of the universe, beloved of worlds that most will never dream of, much less see … can’t you see where you owe it to yourselves to be kind? To care for one another? No one outside this room will ever understand what you’ve been through the way the people around you right now understand.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“They're the wrong colors, right? Somebody else's rainbow.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Death was precious. That didn't change the fact that life was limited.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Older than I look, younger than I ought to be. My skin is a riddle not to be solved, and even letting go of everything I love won’t offer me the answer. My window is closing, if that’s what you’re asking. Every day I wake up a little more linear, a little less lost, and one day I’ll be one of the women who says ‘I had the most charming dream,’ and I’ll mean it. Old enough to know what I’m losing in the process of being found.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“That's because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole," said one of the other boys. "C.S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn't know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he'd probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“You're nobody's rainbow. You're nobody's princess. You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway