Kingfisher Ursula Vernon Pony Quotes

Oh dear God, no, stop!"

Fumblefoot gave her a reproachful look. Stop what?

I have broken into an enchanted manor house and my pony has crapped on the floor. Oh God.

-Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher ~ T. Kingfisher

Air and Water can just swirl around being swirly, and Fire is just kind of aggressive, but my gut feeling is that Earth needs to work for a living. Earth has stuff to be doing. Earth is busy. Earth is solid and responsible and works hard. Earth is reliable. Earth is the designated driver of the elements and will always come over and feed the cat when you're out of town. ~ Ursula Vernon

The world was hard and fierce, but it also contained tomato sandwiches, and if that didn't make it a world worth living in, your standards were unreasonably high. ~ Ursula Vernon

He was tall and slim and had dark hair and young women found him fascinating.

This sort of thing happens often enough, even with boys as mortal as dirt. There's always one who learned how to brood early and often, and always girls who think they can heal him.

Eventually the girls learn better. Either the hurts are petty little things and they get tired of whining or the hurt's so deep and wide that they drown in it. The smart ones heave themselves back to shore and the slower ones wake up married with a husband who lies around and suffers in their direction. It's part of a dance as old as the jackalopes themselves. ~ Ursula Vernon

I love boats. Boats are great. You can get all kinds of places and meet all kinds of interesting people, and you never know if they're going to try to eat you or worship you. ~ Ursula Vernon

Dragons have been known to have staring contests with mountains. They usually win. ~ Ursula Vernon

If I may bend your ear for a moment, I like Terry Pratchett. I like footnotes. I like footnotes even when they are not as entertaining as a Pratchett footnote, even when they are in the middle of a book on evolutionary biology and briefly explain the Red Queen hypothesis or the fate of the Stephen's Island Wren or how many bunnies can dance on the back of Australia. Footnotes fill me with a very mild glee. The endnote simply does not compare. ~ Ursula Vernon

Every now and again, a painting will get away from my control and take over. Sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's a giant drooling hairy thing with pointy teeth. You know how it is. ~ Ursula Vernon

So we have this eyesore on the property.
No, it's not the beagle. I can understand why you'd think that, though. ~ Ursula Vernon

I don't always burn my bridges, but when I do, I like there to be no survivors. ~ Ursula Vernon

Maps? There are no maps.
I go by dark ways, unclean ways. If such a map existed, it would be beyond price. Nameless cults would battle in the low places of the earth for such a price. Dreamers would starve themselves in endless visions seeking its location.
Such a map would have to be drawn on the skin of a black he-goat, in virgin's blood, with a brush made of dragon's eyelashes. The cartographer would go mad, and it would profane the hands that touched it. ~ Ursula Vernon

There is something about a bathroom that feels like a fortress. A closed bathroom door may only be about two inches of plywood, but it feels like an iron bar. ~ Ursula Vernon

Once upon a time there was a girl who discovered that if she played a certain tune on a jade flute, she could summon up jade gnomes, a peculiar, harmless, but rather creepy looking spirit of the underground. The fact is that many of us have talents like this, but generally never discover them due to lack of opportunity, since one can go one's entire life without playing a jade flute, or discovering that one can speak the language of ground sloths, or turning fruitcake into solid tungsten by singing Sinatra tunes to it under a quarter moon. ~ Ursula Vernon

And now you will ask me about the musicians that played for the jackalope wives. Well, if you can find a place where they've been dancing, you might see something like sidewinder tracks in the dust, and more than that I cannot tell you. The desert chews its secrets right down to the bone. ~ Ursula Vernon

I hate prophesies! All they're good for is an extra club to beat yourself up with after the fact. ~ Ursula Vernon

The last time Wendell's mother had caught them playing cowboys and Indians, she'd read them a twenty-minute lecture on the history of Native American oppression, which had really put a damper on things. It was hard to have a thrilling shoot-out while yelling: 'I respect your position and hope that we can come to a mutually respectful conclusion! ~ Ursula Vernon

Temper is itself an obstacle. ~ Ursula Vernon

And that's how Snuggles the hamster learned that yes, things COULD always get worse. ~ Ursula Vernon

Wilbur looked at the list glumly. "Are you sure you need all this stuff?"
"Yep."
"The ax?"
"The ax is critical."
"The chalk?"
"The chalk is super-critical."
"The bungee cords?"
"Bungee cords are the single most useful object in the universe, Wilbur. People may say it's duct tape, but it's actually bungee cords. All great heroes know this. ~ Ursula Vernon

I don't know why people don't paint more warthogs. Warthogs are fantastic. They have the most marvelous faces, like cracked mud with tusks. And the eyelashes! Like many otherwise hideous animals, they have truly spectacular eyelashes. But nooo, it's always the charismatic mammals, like foxes and wolves and tigers. Have you ever smelled a fox? Believe me, the warthog produces a light, airy fragrance suitable for the home or office compared to a fox. Um. What was I saying again? ~ Ursula Vernon

She detested the princes cordially, because she had asked them for help long ago when the hamster kingdom had been trapped under a spell of sleep, and they had laughed at her. (Her mother insisted on the 'cordial' part. Harriet would have preferred to detest them actively, possibly with screaming, but since their parents ruled neighbouring kingdoms, this was not considered diplomatic.) ~ Ursula Vernon

Grandma Harken was sharpening her garden shears. Her hands slowed on the file and she said finally, "He'll get in trouble and he'll figure it out. Best to do it without us standing over him. It's the only way anybody ever learns to clean up after themselves. ~ Ursula Vernon

I know exactly what is at stake, Captain. You are trying to convince yourself that whatever cause you follow is worth that girl's death.
I know all about gods, Captain. I know that a god that demands a child's life is not a god worth saving. ~ Ursula Vernon

She didn't look any older, so far as she could tell from the mirror, but her heart felt like somebody had been scraping the last bits out with a spoon. ~ Ursula Vernon

Trolls have a longstanding animosity for goats
"Who's that trip-tapping across my bridge!?"
and this led me to think that perhaps trolls are related to goats, since it seems a lot more plausible to me that your relatives would make you insane than some random hooved mammal, however ecologically destructive it might be. What if trolls evolved from goats? Or, no, better yet, what if goats evolved from trolls? Or were domesticated from trolls by human shepherds? And the trolls despise their domesticated cousins as a disgrace to the once-proud troll race, (much as I assume wolves would despise Chihuahuas if they ever gave them much thought) and eat them at every opportunity. ~ Ursula Vernon

Okay. Morality in a nutshell. Don't hurt people if you can avoid it. Don't steal stuff unless you're starving or it's really, really important. Work hard. Pay your bills. Try to help others. Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved. If you screwed it up, you need to see it gets fixed. And don't eat anything that talks. If it doesn't fall under one of those categories, just do the best you can. ~ Ursula Vernon

A false path must be tensely and angrily defended by those it has deceived. ~ Vernon Howard

Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly. ~ Kate Atkinson

Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Truth is a matter of the imagination. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Can I have a pony?"
Oh, boy.
I think about it for exactly one second.
"Absolutely."
She squeezes me tighter and squeals.
"Only ... don't tell mommy until after it's delivered, okay? ~ Emma Chase

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature ... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.'
Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.'
When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don't whine like so many adults. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ged stood sick and haggard. He said at last, "Better I had died." "Who are you to judge that, you for whom Nemmerle gave his life? - You are safe here. You will live here, and go on with your training. They tell me you were clever. Go on and do your work. Do it well. It is all you can do. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Help,' Jo moaned. 'I think I'm in a coma.'

It was seven o'clock. The library walls were scrubbed clean and Allie's neck and shoulders ached whenever she even thought about raising her arms as she sat on the dust sheet next to Jo.

'Do your arms hurt?' Allie asked, rubbing her shoulders.

'God yes.'

'Then you're not in a coma.' Gingerly Allie stretched out her legs. 'Jesus. What have I got myself into? Rachel has a swimming pool and horses. Horses, Jo. I could be floating in a pool and petting soft pony noses if I were still at her house.'

'Here.' Jo turned to face her. 'My nose is soft. You can pet it.'

Allie stroked her nose tiredly. 'Wow. This is just like being at Rachel's. Where's the pool?'

'No pool,' Jo said. 'Showers.'

'Sucks.'

'Totally.'

'Are you two just going to lie there complaining? Or are you coming to dinner?' Allie looked up to see Carter standing above them, studying them doubtfully.

'Jo's in a coma,' Allie informed him. 'She no longer needs food.'

'Wait. Did you say food? I think I'm actually awake.' Jo scrambled to her feet.

'My God,' Allie said mildly. 'It's a miracle.'

'You've only been doing this one day, Sheridan.' Carter reached down to pull her up. 'You can't be tired already.'

'Everything hurts,' she said. 'Shoulders, arms, back …'

'Legs, feet, head …' Jo offered helpfully.
< ~ C.J. Daugherty

First,
quit picking old wounds
and going for walks in the aches
and pains you already made it through -
you call it healing, but
it sounds like a good way
to take a haunting home with you. ~ Ashe Vernon

When your Super Bowl guests arrive, they should find a mound of potato chips large enough to conceal a pony sitting in front of the television. For nutritional balance, you should also put out a bowl of carrot sticks. If you have no carrot sticks, you can use pinecones, or used electrical fuses, because nobody will eat them anyway. This is no time for nutritional balance: This is the Super Bowl, for God's sake. ~ Dave Barry

Collecting is my passion. ~ Ursula Andress

I do think that our culture or our psyche as a country I guess, the world or whatever, we're due for a huge event. We're due for a little bit of a revolution or a spotlight or a movement. Something that feels large, something that feels like the 60s. Some sort of unification. ~ Justin Vernon

I shook my head. "You know I ain't never going to be good enough for her. She can't fall in love with me, you know as well as I do that nothing good is going to come of her staying with me."
"Then why do you stay with her? Why, if you seem to think that this is a bad idea, do you stay with her?"
I raked my fingers through my hair. "I don't know! Maybe I'm stupid? A glutton for punishment."
Jackson pointed his beer at me. "Or maybe you love her too and that scares the shit out of you. ~ Magan Vernon

I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin