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“And if my choice is to sit graciously in my best robes and accept the inevitable or to bail a sea with a bucket, give me the bucket.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“We are all only mortal," said the Master, even more slowly. "We do only what we can do. All the Elemental priests have certain teachings in common: one of them is that everyone, every human, every bird, badger and salamander, every blade of grass and every acorn, is doing the best it can. This is the priests' definition of mortality: the circumstance of doing what one can is that of doing one's best. Only the immortals have the luxury of furlough. Doing one's best is hard work; we rely on our surroundings because we must; when our surroundings change, we stumble. If you are running as fast as you can, only a tiny roughness of the ground may make you fall.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“And when I looked up and saw you as you were, in no gaudy robes and bearing no solemn goblet - suddenly I had hope.'
'I did not see you looking,' said Mirasol.
'I did no want you to see,' said the Master.'And I looked away quickly, because I knew the hope was false. I knew - I think I knew - that it was not really about hope, it was about looking at you. And so I looked at Horuld, and at his sword, and reminded myself that they were about to kill me.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm here and I'm listening; and there is still joy in this world.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“Not all honeyâ€� she had concludedâ€� had a specific use beyond what all honey is good for, sweetness and salves. But this honey, it was somehow so strong that it must be for something, though she had still not learnt what it was. The best she had come to was that this honey was for joy...”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“She thought, I need no cup. I am Chalice. I am filling with the grief and hurt and fear of my demesne; the shattered earthlines weigh me down; I am brimming with the needs of my people.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“The Pavilion did not burn by lightening," she said.

He hesitated again. "It holds the memory of fire," he said at last. "Lightening is young and strong and thoughtless, but it could also wish to visit the site of some particular victory of one of its kind--as a young soldier recently commissioned might visit the scene of some great battle--”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“Despair was a private weakness she could not afford to indulge.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“One of the things she'd learnt on her own, ragged, bemused, zigzag way was that the best sources of useful information were often in strange places...”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“He was not tall and handsome and flashing-eyed like his older brother, but there was kindness and grace in him, and intelligence in his unremarkable brown eyes.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“Your Chalice, Master, sees all things clearly, which is both her strength and her weakness.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“Swords. That is no faenorn ; that is slaughter.â€�

The Grand Seneschal shrugged. “The Master did not protest. And, indeed, what weapon could he have suggested that would suit him any better?�

“Fire,� she said.

“He would not,â€� said the Seneschal. “You know he would not.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“it was nearly dawn, and the hill was white with snow. She was covered with a thick blanket of bees, and the snow lay upon them in bright broken spangles. She sat up in distressâ€� bees cannot survive hard cold outside their hivesâ€� but they seemed to shake themselves...”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“But her curiosity got the better of her and at last she went back to where she’d left a big shallow basin of milk only the day before…and found the surface of the milk invisible under a carpet of her bees. “Bees don’t drink milk,â€� she said to them. When they lifted and flew away the basin was empty and clean.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“...she’d found she couldn’t bring herself to kill any of her bees, which was the system all the northern demesnes used, and so had to get them through the winter somehow. She’d been cold that winter herself, after wrapping up her most exposed hives in all the blankets she had.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“Waterâ€� plain water from the Ladywellâ€� and a spoonful of honey, Master.â€� She was sureâ€� she was almost sureâ€� she did not imagine it that he smiled. And it was only after her answer that she felt him begin to draw the cup toward himself. Still he did notâ€� or could notâ€� bear its weight, and so she carried it for him. Together they made only a faint gesture of holding it above his head, for the audience to see; and then she tipped it gently against his mouth, and saw him drink.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“I am not strong enough," she said. She had never said this aloud to anyone before—anyone but her bees. "I know too little, and I do not learn fast enough. And there are not enough hours in the day." And the land has been bent away from true too far and for too long.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“It wasn't the work of the Chalice she minded. It was the vast unfathomable burden of its responsibility. She still felt the Chalice was incomprehensibly beyond her—even wished that it were incomprehensibly beyond her, so she could give up.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice

“The jar her hand had chosen—and it was an odd old wooden jar, a recognizable crooked shape under her fingers, a reject because it would not sit straight on a shelf, the only empty jar she could find when at the last minute she’d decided to take a little more honey on her journey, a little of the mysterious honey, the honey that seemed to suggest laughter and joy and a long bright horizon, the strong-tasting honey whose distinguishing source she could not identify. She’d almost laughed when she decanted it because the bigger crock it lived in was also very crooked, not merely a reject but so lopsided that her mother had kept trying to throw it out, and her father kept rescuing it; and when her father died her mother kept it after all, for those memories of him. Mirasol had thought, as she carefully poured, that perhaps this honey had an affinity for those who do not sit securely, who do not rest peacefully, who limp instead of walk. She hadn’t quite been able to laugh, but she’d been smiling when she tucked it into its corner of a saddlebag, and the smile had been as refreshing as cold water Ron a hot day. This was the honey that had given her energy in the sennight past when she had none, the honey she had put last into the cup for her last-of-all stop on the pavilion hill.”
― Robin McKinley, Chalice