Quotes From "Sunshine" By Robin McKinley

The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope. Robin McKinley

So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town--the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them--and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love. Robin McKinley

I'd always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be living fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice. Robin McKinley

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you. Can I trust him? What do I have to lose? Robin McKinley

Love doesn’t exist, you see. It’s just another shadowy figure that goes bump in the night. Nikki Rae

What this world doesn't have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who *invented* this system? Robin McKinley

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

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. Robin McKinley

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. Robin McKinley

Monsters can live inside a person. Sometimes they know about it. More often they don't. Nikki Rae

Evolve? Like a Pokemon?' I have no idea why I say this. I think I'm kind of going into shock, and the first thing that pops into my head when he says evolve is Charmander evolving into Charizard. Nikki Rae

Love is a monster. Nikki Rae

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. Robin McKinley

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

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

...but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago "something or other or die" had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other. Robin McKinley

Vampires do breathe, by the way, but their chests don't move like humans'. Have you ever lain in the arms of your sweetheart and tried to match your breathing to his, or hers? You do it automatically. Your brain only gets involved if your body is having trouble. Fortunately there was nothing about this situation that was like being in the arms of a sweetheart except that I was leaning against someone's naked chest. I could no more have breathed with him than I could have ignited gasoline and shot exhaust out my butt because I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car. Robin McKinley

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto? Robin McKinley

Some monsters disguise themselves so well you don’t realize that they’re monsters until it’s too late. You check all of the usual places: under the bed, in the closet, behind the shower curtain, around that suspicious, dark corner of your room. No, some monsters don’t look like monsters at all. But they are, have been, and always will be there. Nikki Rae

There are always cats around Charlie's, but they are usually refugees seeking asylum from the local rat population, and rather desperately friendly. Robin McKinley

How does a hundred-and-eighty-pound man turn into a ninety-pound wolf? Where does the leftover ninety go? Does he park it in the umbrella stand overnight? Robin McKinley

Dying is beautiful- even the first time around, at the ripe old age of 20. It’s not easy most of the time, but there is real beauty to be found in knowing that your end is going to catch up with you faster than you had expected, and that you have to get all your loving and laughing and crying done as soon as you can. Norma Klein

Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe. Robin McKinley

Jesse reached into a bottom drawer and brought out a bottle of... oh, hey, single-malt scotch. Some SOFs did know how to live. Robin McKinley

Monsters can live inside a person. Sometimes, they know about it. More often, they don’t. The monster makes them feel safe, or at the very least, better. As long as you know it’s there, you can co-exist with it. Give it what it wants, and it will return the favor. Other times, the monster takes over. Bares its teeth. Nikki Rae