Diana Wynne Jones Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

Please, your story, or I shall offend the dignitaries of my kingdom by yawning at holy things.

Diana Wynne Jones
Then watch out. I warn you!" "That is very considerate of you," said Chrestomanci. "I like to be warned.

Diana Wynne Jones
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.

Diana Wynne Jones
Nothing is safe from you. If I were to court a girl who lived on an iceberg in the middle of the ocean, sooner or later— probably sooner— I'd look up to see you swooping overhead on a broomstick. In fact, by now I'd be disappointed in you if I didn't see you. Are you off to the iceberg today? Sophie retorted.

Diana Wynne Jones
He scarcely saw his parents. When Christopher was small, he was terrified that he would meet Papa out walking in the Park one day and not recognize him.

Diana Wynne Jones
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.

Diana Wynne Jones
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.

Diana Wynne Jones
If you must know, I-I had never in my life kissed a young lady, and you are far too beautiful to me to want to get it wrong!

Diana Wynne Jones
"If nothing happened, then there's nothing to remember," she told herself, trying to sound philosophical. "Of course there's nowhere to start."

Diana Wynne Jones
I've often noticed" Fiona said, "that when people say, 'This can't happen in this day and age', they say it because it is happening.

Diana Wynne Jones
"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.

Diana Wynne Jones
It does not seem to me that I have the right to foist a story on people, most of whom are children who should be learning all the time, unless I am learning from it too.

Diana Wynne Jones
"Maybe," he said, "you should be more careful about whom you let your dog bite."
"Not I!" said Jamal. "I am a believer of free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so."

Diana Wynne Jones
"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.

Diana Wynne Jones
Alas, poor Yorick!" he said. "She heard mermaids, so it follows that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. I have caught an everlasting cold, but luckily I am terribly dishonest. I cling to that.

Diana Wynne Jones
Vivian stared. Never had she seen a boy with such long hair! In fact, she had a vague notion that boys were born with their hair short back and sides and only girls had hair that grew long.

Diana Wynne Jones
A garden should be natural-seeming, with wild sections, including a large area of bluebells.

Diana Wynne Jones
Go to bed, you fool," Calcifer said sleepily. "You're drunk." "Who, me?" said Howl. "I assure you, my friends, I am cone sold stober." He got up and stalked upstairs, feeling for the wall as if he thought it might escape him unless he kept in touch with it. His bedroom door did escape him.

Diana Wynne Jones
Don't interrupt,' one of the boys said. 'He'll lose his life.' Seeing it was a matter of life and death, Sophie and Michael backed toward the door. But Howl, quite unperturbed at killing his nephew, strode over to the wall and pulled the boxes up by the roots.

Diana Wynne Jones
Interesting things did seem to happen, but always to somebody else.

Diana Wynne Jones
"Tell me of this Wizard Howl of yours."
Sophie's teeth chattered, but she said proudly, "He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly and you can't pin him down to anything."
"Indeed?" asked Abdullah. "Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies."
"What do you mean — vices?" Sophie asked angrily. "I was just describing Howl."

Diana Wynne Jones
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.

Diana Wynne Jones
That's why I love spiders. 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.

Diana Wynne Jones
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-

Diana Wynne Jones
Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look.

Diana Wynne Jones
There were horrendous, dramatic, violent quantities of green slime—oodles of it. It covered Howl completely. It draped his head and shoulders in sticky dollops, heaping on his knees and hands, trickling in glops down his legs, and dripping off the stool in sticky strands. It was in oozing ponds and crawling pools over most of the floor. Long fingers of it had crept into the hearth. It smelled vile.

Diana Wynne Jones
"If you call me V. S. once again," she said, "I shall scream - I warn you!"
Sam patted her arm. "You need a butter-pie," he said kindly.

Diana Wynne Jones
"Oh, Lord! He's a weeper!" Grandad said disgustedly. "I wish I'd known. I'd have stayed away."
"A lot of Merlins have cried when they prophesied," Dad pointed out.
"I know. But I don't have to like it, do I?" Grandad retorted.

Diana Wynne Jones
Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people's lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.

Diana Wynne Jones
Ann looked down at him, spread on the bank preparing to go to sleep, and lost her temper. "Then you should go and tell him! You should look after him! He's all alone in this wood, and he's quite small, and he doesn't even know he's not supposed to go out of it. He probably doesn't even know how to work the field to get food. You - you calmly make him up, out of blood and - and nothing, and you expect him to do your dirty work for you, and you don't even tell him the rules! You can't do that to a person!"

Diana Wynne Jones