Quotes from The Enemy

Charlie Higson ·  406 pages

Rating: (18.9K votes)


“If a wolf attacks his sheep, the shepard kills the wolf, but he eats the sheep when he's hungry.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“No such word as can't. No such word as babagoozle neither!”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“But I'll never see any of those fish," said Maxie."Or those whales. Or any lions or tigers. I'm never going to set foot in a rain forest now, am I? I won't even be able to watch old DVD's about them without electricity. What does the future hold? It's like going back to the middle ages. Nobody knowing what was going on beyond their front doorstep. All I'll ever know is this. This little bit of London.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“There was always a slug on the lettuce.
This was too good to be true.
He had never trusted Jester, and didn't trust David.
He wasn't going to let his gaurd down just yet.
Being carful had kept him alive this far.
There was no reason to stop being careful now.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“There was a reason these boys were still alive, though. Something made them stronger than the other kids, the ones who had died in the early days, who had simply lain down and given up, unable to cope with the terrible things that were happening in the world. These boys were survivors. The will to live was stronger than any other feelings.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy



“Standing in the corridor was a large plastic bin on wheels. He looked inside. Empty tins of dog food. That explained the spaghetti with meat sauce. Oh well, he'd eaten worse.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“I’m different,” said the Kid. “My gran always said I was half clever, half stupid, and half crazy.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“When we're strong enough," said Sam, "will you come with me?"
"Where? To Bucko Palace?"
"Yes. To find Ella."
"Course I will," said the Kid, and he put an arm around Sam. "It'll be a new grand adventure of the old school. They'll write books about us. Long books. Nothing's gonna split us up, small fry. We're a team. Like Batman and Robin Hood."
And he sang.
"Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-Batman!”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“THIS IS WHERE ARRAN HARPER FELL. WE DON’T KNOW THE DAY OR THE DATE, BUT WE’LL NEVER FORGET IT. HE WAS THE BRAVEST OF US ALL.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“Arran’s grey-blue eyes opened and they were clear and bright. He smiled at Maxie. ‘I love you, Mum,’ he said quietly and he died in Maxie’s arms.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy



“The first drops of rain started to fall.
'God's policemen,' said Jester.
'You what?'
'The police always used to pray for rain before any big demonstration because people wouldn't turn up. Nobody wants to run riot in the streets if it's pouring with rain. Who's going to want to fight in this?”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired,' said Maxie.
'I know how that feels,' said Blue.
'I think some Pharaoh had that carved on his tomb,' Maxie added.
'Yeah? Times don't change much, do they?”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“Remember what I done for you here today,' he shouted and passed out.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“Course I'm scared. I'm always scared when we go somewhere we've not been before. It's good to be scared. Keeps you alive." - Ollie, The Enemy”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy


“I just miss him, is all. He used to make me laugh, nothing else did.”
― Charlie Higson, quote from The Enemy



About the author

Charlie Higson
Born place: in The United Kingdom
Born date July 3, 1958
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Popular quotes

“El destino del hombre es equivocarse, afanarse inútilmente y sufrir, pero lo que no puede es quedar estancado; sacrifica su vida en aras de lo que considera su deber.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, quote from Gora


“It's never going to stop,’ Malenfant whispered. ‘It will consume the Solar System, the stars—’
This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually—
‘The future has gone,’ Malenfant said. ‘My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...’ That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. ‘Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—’
Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble.
There. Can you see that? It's already starting...
‘What is?’
The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum—remnants of our universe—isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like—
‘Like black holes.’ And in that instant, Malenfant understood. ‘That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.’
Much better. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores.
‘And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?...’
We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes—universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining—and many, many of them will harbor life and mind.
‘But we were the first.’
Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind—the first intelligence of all—had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind. We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children—the maligned Blues—and we put it right. This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it. We were parents of the universe, not its children.”
― Stephen Baxter, quote from Manifold: Time


“I gulped; I had the overwhelming sensation that what we had done wasn’t enough. I’m not sure what I had expected, maybe a fairy tale ending
where a magic wand fixed everything, including all the darkness we had been through.
But this was no fairy tale. Nothing could bring back the thirty boys that had died. Nothing could take away the grief that had torn their family’s
hearts into shreds. Experiences like this, I realized, are wounds that never quite healed; they stayed with you and no amount of justice would erase
the scar.”
― Lani Woodland, quote from Intrinsical


“I won’t even pretend I didn’t care. I wanted to win. I mean, if you don’t care about winning the competition, why show up?”
― Justin Bieber, quote from First Step 2 Forever


“If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walking


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