Diana Wynne Jones Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

I had a mitherable childhood. Nobody loved me. I think I have a right to try again, looking pwettier, don't you?

Diana Wynne Jones
I have been with the Court all my life, travelling with the King's Progress.
I didn't know how to go on. I sat and stared at this sentence, until Grundo said, "If you can't do it, I will."
If you didn't know Grundo, you'd think this was a generous offer, but it was a threat really. Grundo is dyslexic. Unless he thinks hard, he writes inside out and backwards. He was threatening me with half a page of crooked writing with words like "inside" turning up as "sindie" and "story" as "otsyr".

Diana Wynne Jones
After that, he tried to go upstairs through the broom cupboard, and then the yard. This seemed to puzzle him a little. But finally he discovered the stairs, all except the bottom on, and fell up them on his face. The whole castle shook.

Diana Wynne Jones
Mitt did not quite forget his perfect land. He remembered it, though a little fuzzily, next time the wind dropped, but he did not set off to look for it again. It was plain to him that soldiers only brought you back again if you went. It made him sad. When an inkling of it came to him in silence, or in scents, or, later, if the wind hummed a certain note, or a storm came shouting in from the sea and he caught the same note in the midst of its noise, he thought of his lost perfect place and felt for a moment as if his heart would break.

Diana Wynne Jones
Calcifer," Sophie said, "I shall have to break your contract. Will it kill you?" "It would if anyone else broke it," Calcifer said hoarsely. "That's why I asked you to do it.

Diana Wynne Jones
"Oh, what a sweet little doggie!" Mrs Baker cried out. "Is ooh hungwy, then?" She gave Waif the rest of the cake she was eating. Waif took it politely, ate it in one gulp and continued to beg. Mrs Baker gave her a whole cake from the plate. This caused Waif to beg more soulfully than ever.
"I'm disgusted," Charmain told Waif.

Diana Wynne Jones
"It looks as if you need only enter the field for long enough to recognise the bannus and take hold of it. Then you order it to stop."
"Fight my way through a mob of dancing girls and snatch the dulcimer off the leading damsel," Reigner Two said morbidly. "I can just see myself. I think the fools who invented this thing might have thought of a simpler way to stop it. What's wrong with a red switch?"

Diana Wynne Jones
"Can I eat these?" he said.
"No," said Vivian. "I'm hungry."
"I'll give you half," Sam said, plainly thinking he was being generous.

Diana Wynne Jones
It's amazing the way one can take a step ten and a half miles long and still always land in a cowpat.

Diana Wynne Jones
"I don't believe this!" Peter said. "Why is it respectable not to know how to do things? Is it respectable to light a fire with a bar of soap?"
"That," Charmain said haughtily, "was an accident."

Diana Wynne Jones
I was a thoroughly hardened Homeward Bounder. There seemed nothing I didn't know.
Then I ran into Helen. My friendly neighbourhood enemy. There really was nothing like Helen on any world I'd ever been to. I sometimes didn't think she was human at all.

Diana Wynne Jones
"Don't you even feel how marvellous it is to have talked to one of the Little People?" I said.
"No, not as the main thing," Grundo grunted. "If you think like that, then you're treating him like something in a museum, not as a person."

Diana Wynne Jones
"Heroes see things like that," he said.
"It's obviously an enchantment of some kind," Polly agreed, humouring him.
"It must be," he said. It sounded as if he was humouring her.

Diana Wynne Jones
Wizard Howl," said Wizard Suliman. "I must apologize for trying to bite you so often. In the normal way, I wouldn't dream of setting teeth in a fellow countryman.

Diana Wynne Jones
That was the trouble with Joris. He was nice. You ended up liking him, whatever you did. Even when you wanted to shake him till his head fell off.

Diana Wynne Jones
If you stood up and told the truth in the wrong way, it was not true any longer, though it might be as powerful as ever.

Diana Wynne Jones
One does not want glory accepted as a matter of course. One wants to shock and astonish people with it.

Diana Wynne Jones
"Unprintable things!" I said - only I didn't say that. I really said them.

Diana Wynne Jones
Oh! Polly thought. Why aren't all girls locked up by law the year they turn fifteen? They do such stupid things!

Diana Wynne Jones
Really, these wizards! You'd think no one had ever had a cold before! Well, what is it?" she asked, hobbling through the bedroom door onto the filthy carpet. "I'm dying of boredom," Howl said pathetically. "Or maybe just dying.

Diana Wynne Jones
Do you mind not being so kind and obedient? It makes me nervous.

Diana Wynne Jones
"I never said my wishes were supposed to do anyone any good," said the genie. "In fact, I swore that they would always do as much harm as possible."

Diana Wynne Jones
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.

Diana Wynne Jones
Adara was impressed. "How do you know that?"
"I learnt it," said Hathil. "It pays to learn things."

Diana Wynne Jones
"It is of course a magic carpet."
Abdullah had heard that one before. He bowed over his tucked-up hands. "Many and various are the virtues said to reside in carpets," he agreed. "Which one does the poet of the sands claim for this? Does it welcome a man home to his tent? Does it bring peace to the hearth? Or maybe," he said, poking the frayed edge suggestively with one toe, "it is said to never wear out?"

Diana Wynne Jones
By now it was clear that Howl was in a mood to produce green slime any second. Sophie hurriedly put her sewing away. "I'll make some hot buttered toast," she said. "Is that all you can do in the face of tragedy??" Howl asked. "Make toast!

Diana Wynne Jones
"Amazing. You're here, but you can't do a simple thing like raising light, or do I mean lazing right? Whichever. You can't. Why not?"
"No one ever showed me how," I said.
He swayed about, looking solemn. "I quote," he said. "I'm very well read in the literature of several worlds, you know, and I quote. What do they teach them in these schools?"

Diana Wynne Jones
I'm beginning to think I've led a much too sheltered life.

Diana Wynne Jones
"What you do is find your centre - can you do that?"
"My navel, you mean?" I said.
"No, no!" he howled. "You're not a woman! Or are you?"

Diana Wynne Jones
Happiness isn't a thing. You can't go out and get it like a cup of tea. It's the way you feel about things.

Diana Wynne Jones