Diana Wynne Jones Quotes

That was the trouble with Joris. He was nice. You ended up liking him, whatever you did. Even when you wanted to shake him till his head fell off.

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.

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

You wouldn't believe how lonely you get.

There was a little white statue there. Now I'm not artistic. I saw it was of a fellow with no clothes on - I always wonder why it's Art to take your clothes off: they never put in the goose pimples - and this fellow was wrapped in chains. He didn't look as if he was enjoying himself, and small wonder.

"This is a very old argument. The greatest happiness of the greatest number. If you think about it, you'll find it always works out that a few suffer for the good of the rest." "In stories," Gair agreed hopelessly. "brave men die defending the rest. But this isn't like that!" "Call it the modern version," Mr Claybury suggested kindly.

Over scones round the kitchen table, it emerged that Aunt Mary thought Ayna, Gair and Ceri came from Malaysia. Brenda looked at their faces and breathed in half a scone. While Gerald was pounding Brenda on the back, Ceri leaned back from the vibrating table and looked at Aunt Mary limpidly in the eye. "I'm afraid we don't remember Masaylia at all." "Malaysia!" hissed Ayna. "Or that either," said Ceri.

"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.

She was one of those who could talk and talk and talk. Gair listened to her harsh voice - "Just like a duck," Ayna described it - and hoped she would lose the argument. But Adara once said Kasta had never lost an argument in her life. She just talked everyone insensible.

Adara was impressed. "How do you know that?" "I learnt it," said Hathil. "It pays to learn things."

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

The only good Dorig is a dead Dorig.

Mitt did not quite forget his perfect land. He remembered it, though a little fuzzily, next time the wind dropped, but he did not set off to look for it again. It was plain to him that soldiers only brought you back again if you went. It made him sad. When an inkling of it came to him in silence, or in scents, or, later, if the wind hummed a certain note, or a storm came shouting in from the sea and he caught the same note in the midst of its noise, he thought of his lost perfect place and felt for a moment as if his heart would break.

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.

If you stood up and told the truth in the wrong way, it was not true any longer, though it might be as powerful as ever.