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"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."
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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.
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That's why I love spiders. 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.
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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-
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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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.
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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!"
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I had a mitherable childhood. Nobody loved me. I think I have a right to try again, looking pwettier, don't you?
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"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?"
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"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.
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It's amazing the way one can take a step ten and a half miles long and still always land in a cowpat.
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"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."
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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.
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"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."
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Diana Wynne Jones
Born:
August 16, 1934
Died:
March 26, 2011
(aged 76)
Bio:
Diana Wynne Jones was a British writer, principally of fantasy novels for children and adults.
Known for:
Howl's Moving Castle (1986)
Charmed Life (1977)
Castle in the Air (1990)
Witch Week (1982)
House of Many Ways (2008)
Most used words:
howl
sophie
people
thought
life
asked
person
wizard
time
wrong
hair
vivian
girls
told
waif
Diana Wynne Jones on Wikipedia
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