Quotes from Lynne Reid Banks

The very people you trusted most could become like strangers in their longing...

Most men, if you just tell them what to do in a businesslike fashion, will follow directions without thinking about it. One proceeds on the assumption that they'll do as they're told, and they do.

The Spring can be more painful than any other time of the year. Summer is lazy and indifferent. Autumn is demanding and invigorating. Winter is numb and self-contained, but Spring has none of the palliatives. Every emotional nerve is close to the surface. Every sound and sight, every touch of the air is a summons to feel, to open your doors, to let life possess you and do what it likes with you.

That it's possible to be against the circus, not because you're afraid to die there, but because it's wicked and wrong. ~Aurelia, 152

the fun of keeping things in them. He was not a very tidy boy in general, but he did like arranging things in cupboards and drawers and then opening them later and finding them just as he'd left them.

Beard," said Patrick, which was their school slang for "I don't believe you.

With hands that shook, Omri probed into the depths of the chest till he found the box-within-a-box-within-a-box.

cupboard. The strange little key, which had been his great-grandmother's

When I was your age I met a man older than myself, quite a bit older. I fell in love with him. Really in love. I know people say it's just puppy love at that age, but I was in love properly. It lasted for years. It was the most powerful feeling I can ever remember. At that age one has no defenses. It just overwhelmed me.

What did I tell you when you were little girl? The only way we women can get through our lives honorably is with courage and resignation, both. ~168

Among the innumerable books on Addy's shelves was one by Ernest Hemingway in which I found these words: 'What is moral is what you feel good after. What is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Love lost by one moment's explicit unfairness can't be won back by trying to justify it

Things like this—love-relationships—need a certain minimum of proximity to keep them going.

There's nothing, of course, more damaging and hurtful to the psyche than that—searching grimly for things to despise and revile in a person you once loved. You may destroy the beloved image but at the same time you destroy part of the basis of your self-respect, plus a whole vital chunk out of your past. Because, if he is hateful now, what aberration once caused you to waste so much love on him?

It's funny how, when you really want to say something bitchy and cutting to someone who's been bitchy to you, you can't think of anything till afterwards. When there's no real call for it, you come suddenly out with a piece of 9-carat bitchery that shakes even you.

Omri and Patrick had spent many hours together playing with their joint collections of plastic toys.

Inside was a small white metal cupboard with a mirror in the door, the kind you see over the basin in old-fashioned bathrooms.

Now he closed his eyes and unwished the test pass and wished instead that this little twisty key would turn Gillon's present into a secret cupboard.

He stood pressed against the inside wall of the cupboard, clutching his knife, rigid with terror, but defiant.

You touch—I kill!" the Indian growled ferociously.

He was just under three inches tall. His blue-black hair, done in a plait and pressed to his head by a colored headband, gleamed in the sun. So did the minuscule muscles of his tiny naked torso, and the skin of his arms. His legs were covered with buckskin leggings, which had some decoration on them too small to see properly. He wore a kind of bandolier across his chest and his belt seemed to be made of several strands of some shiny white beads. Best of all, somehow, were his moccasins.

FACT The Native Americans invented the game lacrosse.

Little Bear looked at him steadily and nodded. Omri opened the flap and Indian and horse stepped out into the morning sunlight.

You touch, I kill.