Quotes from My Name Is Mina

“Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“Yes. But sad's alright. Sad's just apart of everything”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.
We let the stars shine into us.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“Sometimes children must be left alone to be still and silent, and to do.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“Then what shall I write? I can't just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I'll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“This might be heaven!
We might be living in heaven right now!
And we might be the angels!”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.
I turn my face towards it and I laugh.
Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make Mina mad.
I laugh again.
Some people think that she's already mad, I think.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“Mum has made a little model of Dad - it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“I love afternoons like that, like when we talk about things like metempsychosis, when we learn so much, and explore so much, and ideas grow and take flight, like the idea about the universe and the egg. I love being home-schooled, when we don't have to stick to subjects and timetables and rules.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“In the end she just said..... All I did was to run away for a few minutes! All I wanted was to be free!”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and . . . Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and . . . And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling . . . paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop our walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house. "What on earth will you be doing with something so large?" said Mum.
"I shall live in it with my servants, of course," said Mina. "Or I shall establish a school."
"A school, my lady?"
"Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

“A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.”
― David Almond, quote from My Name Is Mina

About the author

Popular quotes

“...."the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of the day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.”
― Bruno Schulz, quote from The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories

“Was all this real to her? Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man

“After Darwin, human morality became a scientific mystery. Natural selection could explain how intelligent, upright, linguistic, not so hairy, bipedal primates could evolve, but where did our morals come from? Darwin himself was absorbed by this question. Natural selection, it was thought, promotes ruthless self-interest. Individuals who grab up all the resources and destroy the competition will survive better, reproduce more often, and thus populate the world with their ruthlessly selfish offspring. How, then, could morality evolve in a world that Tennyson famously described as “red in tooth and claw”? We now have an answer. Morality evolved as a solution to the problem of cooperation, as a way of averting the Tragedy of the Commons: Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“[...]while we all have the capacity to do harder things, we also have the desire to do exactly the opposite.”
― Kelly McGonigal, quote from The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It

“When I was cooking I enjoyed a sense of being ‘out’ of myself. The action of dicing vegetables and warming oil made my hands tingle and my thoughts switch to a different hemisphere, right brain rather than left, or left rather than right. In my mind there were many rooms and, just as I still got lost in the labyrinth of corridors at college, I often found myself lost, with a sense of déjà vu, in some obscure part of my cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that plays a key role in perceptual awareness, attention and memory. Everything I had lived through or imagined or dreamed appeared to have been backed up on a video clip and then scattered among those alien rooms. I could stumble into any number of scenes, from the horrifically sexual, horror-movie sequences that were crude and painful, to visualizing Grandpa polishing his shoes.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.