Seanan McGuire Quotes

I left my mark on 'Dark Shadows.' One day I was doing my lines perfectly from Act 3. Everyone else was doing Act 2.

My father died when I was seven. I guess I am interested in fatherlessness as a metaphor for vulnerability and unprotectedness. Being on your own in the world in a way you're not quite ready for, ever.

It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.

I want an explosion the size of Cleveland.

To have all your life's work and to have them along the wall, it's like walking in with no clothes on. It's terrible.

The release of 'Lungs' was so hard. It was terrifying, because it was the first time doing everything. The first experiences of media exposure were almost paralysing. I spent a lot of time crying on the floor of the studio - it sent me a bit mad.

I know that I have to give testimony about all the things I lived, but I need time.

You'll see me everywhere, inside, outside. Only place you won't see me is maybe safety.

Ten years ago, I went to visit my dad in Australia. I walked to the edge of a cliff and looked over and tripped. I righted myself but my head was over the edge. No one saw it.

PTSD occurs following a trauma that was so awful that in retrospect you don't understand how you survived. What that causes is an extreme feeling of vulnerability that you get past but that doesn't go away.

Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land.

I know what war's like. I know what scene's like.

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot survivor of that time, that place.

We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything. Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs.

I was woundering what he would say, what word could sum me up right then, when i saw the lights come across his face, blaringly yellow, and suddenly he was brighter, and brighter, and i asked him what was happening, what was wrong. I remember only that light, so strong it spilled across my shoulders, and lit up his face, and how scared he looked as something big and loud hit my door, sending glass shattering across me, little sparks catching the light like diamonds, as they fell, with me, into the dark.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

the worst happens when you least expect it

Just so you know: if this ever happens to you, you will not be ready.

There's no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not, 'How can we hide our wounds?' so we don't have to be embarrassed, but 'How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?' When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

There was no other sound in the world like a car crash.