“Not a frog, I hope?” he asked…She shook her head. “No. And if it was I wouldn’t kiss it, I promise you. I might kiss a prince if I could be sure he’d turn into a frog, but not the other way around.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Song for Summer
“What are you afraid of then?
Not Being able to see, I think not seeing because your obsessed by something that blots out the world.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Song for Summer
“She stood looking carefully at the labeled portraits Ursala had put up: Little Crow, Chief of the Santees, Geronimo, last of the Apaches, and Ursala's favorite, Big Foot, dying in the snow at Wounded Knee.
"Isn't that where the massacre was?" asked Ellen.
"Yes. I'm going to go there when I'm grown up. To Wounded Knee."
"That seems sensible," said Ellen.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Song for Summer
“What about you, Ellen?' he asked. 'What does music mean to you?'
It was a while before she answered. 'When I was at school... quite little still... there was a girl there who had perfect pitch and a lovely voice and she played the piano. I used to hear people talking about her.' She paused, lacing her fingers together. '"She's musical," they used to say, "Deirdre's musical," and it was as if they'd said: "She's angelic." That's how it seemed to me to be musical: to be angelic.'
Isaac turned to her. 'My God, Ellen,' he said huskily, 'it is you who are angelic. If there's anyone in the world who is angelic it is you.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Song for Summer
“Herr Altenburg, I can't; I have vertigo.' And Marek looked at him: 'All right - I'll get the chemist to fix me something.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Song for Summer
“What are you afraid of then?'
She pondered. He had already noticed that it was her hands which indicated what she was thinking of quite as much as her face and now he watched as she cupped them, making them ready to receive her thoughts.
'Not being able to see, I think,' she said.
'Being blind, you mean?'
'No, not that. That would be terrible hard but Homer managed it and our blind piano tuner is one of the serenest people I know. I mean ... not seeing because you're obsessed by something that blots out the world. Some sort of mania of belief. Or passion. That awful kind of love that makes leaves and birds and cherry blossom invisible because it's not the face on some man.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Song for Summer
“It was a heavenly summer, the summer in which France fell and the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. Leaves were never such an intense and iridescent green; sunlight glinted on flower-studded meadows as the Germans encircled the Maginot Line and overran not only France but Belgium and Holland. Birdsong filled the air in the lull between bursts of gunfire and accompanied the fleeing refugees who blocked the roads. It was as though the weather was preparing a glorious requiem for the death of Europe.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Song for Summer
“Pucetti’s was the generation that was all in favour of sentiment, sharing other people’s pain, voicing compassion for the downtrodden, yet Brunetti often found in them traces of a ruthlessness that chilled his spirit and made him fearful for the future. He wondered if the cheap sentimentality of television and film had sent them into some sort of emotional insulin shock and suffocated their ability to feel empathy with the unappealing victims of the mess that real life created.”
― Donna Leon, quote from Blood from a Stone
“Idiocy is the essence of the male mind.”
― Bill Watterson, quote from Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat
“A self-evident and prefabricated symbolism attaches itself to this slow climb to the zenith, and we are not so foolishly ironic, or confident, as to miss the opportunity to glimpse significantly into the eyes of the other and share the thought that occurs to all at this summit, which is, of course, that they have made it thus far, to a point where they can see horizons previously unseen, and the old earth reveals itself newly. Everything is further heightened, as we must obscurely have planned, by signs of sundown.”
― Joseph O'Neill, quote from Netherland
“If you are lucky you will find something you love doing, if you're really lucky you'll find someone to pay you to do it”
― James Patterson, quote from Violets Are Blue
“Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children. Life is the other way around”
― David Lodge, quote from The British Museum Is Falling Down
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