Robin McKinley Quotes

As a youngster I was a great dreamer, reading many books of adventure and walking lonely miles with my head in the clouds.

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.

It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance.

I remember just lying in the grass, staring at the clouds, wondering where they drifted off to after they floated over Texas. I never would have imagined that one day I would follow one of those clouds and find myself in Hollywood.

I have a lot of respect and love for children's books.

To be honest, Peter Pan was one of those fairy tales that I sort of related to, and I think that's the case with a lot of kids. The whole idea of escapism really resonates with a lot of kids.

Sex is great until you die, but it's never as great as it was when you were a kid, when it was a mystery.

There was part of me that wanted to see the world and travel to distant places, but I could only do it in my imagination, so I read ferociously and imagined things.

I always knew that I was kind of bored; the regular life of a child didn't fit me.

Children live in a world filled with possibilities. Their thoughts roam without boundaries, like dreams – full of images, places and actions. Unlike adults, they can’t temper their imaginations with experience. So, when a child plays with a toy or reads a story, it becomes an adventure, a new reality to them.

When I was a small child, I partially learned to read with comics, in particular with 'Scamp,' about the Lady and the Tramp's male child. That was the prime comic that made me fall in love with comics as a kid.

I started re-reading 'Harry Potter' just to throw myself back into my childhood. I forgot how awesome the books are.

My favorite book growing up was 'The Little Prince.'

There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!

...who can say where a voyage starts - not the the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way?

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.

Child of the pure, unclouded brow and dreaming eyes of wonder.

I'd stare up at the sky and just dream a lot. Still do. I dreamed that I didn't belong here, that I was going to travel a lot.

Without education, you really can't dream as a child.

It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?

I look at [books] as a child looks at cakes - with glittering eyes and a watering mouth, imagining the pleasure that awaits him.

Of all the delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very nearly real. That is why there are night-lights.

Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.