“What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan.”
“He started every entry with I got up. It meant, I hate this school. When he wrote I do not like porridge, that was actually true, but porridge was his code-word for Simon Silverson. Simon was porridge at breakfast, potatoes at lunch, and bread at tea. All the other other he hated had code-words too. Dan Smith was cornflakes, cabbage, and butter. Theresa was milk.”
“You've probably all had those kinds of dreams that are like usual life, except that a lot of things are not the same, and you seem to know the future in them. Well, this is because these other worlds where two things can happen spread out from our world like rainbows, and sort of flow into one another-”
“Can't you just keep your big mouth shut?" Brian said furiously to Nan. He pointed to Chrestomanci. "How do we know he's safe? For all we know, he could be the devil that you summoned up!"
"Oh, you flatter me, Brian," Chrestomanci said.”
“Mr. Crossley suddenly wondered why he was why he was worrying about the note. It was only a joke, after all. He cleared his throat. Everyone looked up hopefully. 'Somebody,' said Mr. Crossley, 'seems to have sent me a Halloween message.' And he read out the note: 'SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH.'
6B thought this was splendid news. Hands shot up all over the room like a bed of beansprouts.
'It's me, Mr. Crossley!'
'Mr. Crossley, I'm the witch!'
'Can I be the witch, Mr. Crossley?'
'Me, Mr. Crossley, me, me, me!”
“When you grow up to be an author and write books, you'll think you're making the books up, but they'll all really be true, somewhere.”
“Charles realized that if he were going to apologize to Chrestomanci, he had better do it at once. He turned around to say it. But the folds had already rippled flat and nothing was the same anymore....”
“What did you do?" said Charles.
"You know that night all our shoes went into the hall," said Nirupam. "Well, we had a feast that night. Dan Smith made me get up the floorboards and get the food out. He says I have no right to be so large and so weak," Nirupam said resentfully, "and I was hating him for it, when I took the boards up and found a pair of running shoes, with spikes, hidden there with the food. I turned those shoes into a chocolate cake. I knew Dan was so greedy that he would eat it all himself. And he did eat it. He didn't let anyone else have any. You may have noticed that he wasn't quite himself the next day."
So much had happened to Charles that particular day, that he could not remember Dan seeming anything at all. He didn't have the heart to explain all the trouble Nirupam had caused him. "Those were my spikes," he said sadly. He wobbled along on the mop rather awed at the thought of iron spikes passing through Dan's stomach. "He must have a digestion like an ostrich!"
"The spikes were turned into cherries," said Nirupam. "The soles were the cream. The shoes as a whole became what is called a Black Forest gateau.”
“Before long, everyone was giving him answers, and feeling a little superior, because it was really remarkable the number of things Chrestomanci seemed not to know. He had heard of Hitler, though he asked Brian to refresh his memory about him, but he had only the haziest notion about Gandhi or Einstein, and he had never heard of Walt Disney or reggae.”
“How does she keep it up? How can Miss Hodge be a teacher and not use witchcraft at all? I use it all the time. How else can I have eyes in the back of my head?'
'One of the great mysteries of our time,' Chrestomanci agreed.”
“Evidently this was the kind of man
that Estelle fell instantly in love with.”
“THE OLD LAB was not used for anything much except detention. But there was still a faint smell of old science clinging to it, from generations of experiments which had gone wrong.”
“Flowers magnetize us with their beauty and reflect back to us our own essence. Their qualities magnify positive aspects of ourselves. They serve as messengers to remind us of the preciousness of life at the most crucial times of our lives. Flowers are doing this for us all the time, and all we have to do is pay attention.”
“With the amount of diazepam in me, I should have been content to lie back and let events unfold as they may, and my curiosity did for a moment consider it, but then a punch of panic reminded me that people far saner than I were murdered for less in more conspicuous locations.”
“How do men think of such wickedness?” Anna asked as wax dripped down the candle and pooled about the holder. “Don’t they fear for their souls?” Pino thought about Rauff and the Black Shirts wearing the hoods. “I don’t think men like that care about their souls,” Pino said, finishing the veal. “It’s like they’ve already gone to evil, and going a little deeper won’t matter.”
“Beneath the eerie calm of these unfathomable waters were deadly whirlpools of ambition, anger and unhappiness.”
“I have been too young to know, and I have been too old to care. It’s in that oh so narrow slice between that memories are made.”
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