Diana Wynne Jones Quotes

Oh, thank goodness! he babbled. I didn't mean it - at least I did, but I don't mean it now, not any more! He flung one arm around Yam and twisted the other into Mordion's rolled cloak. They came. They rustled. Don't let them!

I never said my wishes were supposed to do anyone any good, said the genie. In fact, I swore that they would always do as much harm as possible.

One does not want glory accepted as a matter of course. One wants to shock and astonish people with it.

If nothing happened, then there's nothing to remember, she told herself, trying to sound philosophical. Of course there's nowhere to start.

You wouldn't believe how lonely you get.

People may wonder how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt wondered himself by the end.

"Unprintable things!" I said - only I didn't say that. I really said them.

"Heroes see things like that," he said. "It's obviously an enchantment of some kind," Polly agreed, humouring him. "It must be," he said. It sounded as if he was humouring her.

"If you call me V.S. once again," she said, "I shall scream - I warn you!" Sam patted her arm. "You need a butter-pie," he said kindly.

It looks as if you need only enter the field for long enough to recognise the bannus and take hold of it. Then you order it to stop. Fight my way through a mob of dancing girls and snatch the dulcimer off the leading damsel, Reigner Two said morbidly. I can just see myself. I think the fools who invented this thing might have thought of a simpler way to stop it. What's wrong with a red switch?

I was a thoroughly hardened Homeward Bounder. There seemed nothing I didn't know. Then I ran into Helen. My friendly neighbourhood enemy. There really was nothing like Helen on any world I'd ever been to. I sometimes didn't think she was human at all.

"Look here," Gerald said, "what do you think of Giants?" There was the kind of pause that happens when people do not like to say what they really think.

It is of course a magic carpet. Abdullah had heard that one before. He bowed over his tucked-up hands. Many and various are the virtues said to reside in carpets, he agreed. Which one does the poet of the sands claim for this? Does it welcome a man home to his tent? Does it bring peace to the hearth? Or maybe, he said, poking the frayed edge suggestively with one toe, it is said to never wear out?

Dear Polly, Tom wishes you, for some reason I can't understand, to consider the human back. He says there are many other matters you should consider too, but that was a particularly glaring example. He invites you, he says, to walk along a beach this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves. There you will see backs - backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt. You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair. This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles and midge bites and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh. In fact, he defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers. I hope you know what all this is about, because I don't. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can. Yours ever, Sam.

Please, your story, or I shall offend the dignitaries of my kingdom by yawning at holy things.