Quotes from Lynne Reid Banks

I know what is wrong. You havn't decided what you want.' She'd underlined this many times. 'Terribly important to draw up a balance sheet every now and then, debits and credits. Decide what's important, what's worth fighting for. Don't drift, ever. Decide then act. If you fail well at least you tried. Don't know what you want so can't advise you how to get it.

Oh she's alright it's just that - I don't want to get mixed up with anyone in the house. I don't want to get mixed up at all with anybody anymore.

That's my whole trouble. I don't seem capable of living for the moment. It's as if the future threw back a shadow—a great black shadow of years of loneliness, and it terrifies me so much that I keep lighting little futile lights to try to drive the shadow away.

It seems to me those are just the ones who have to do without, because, in the final analysis, they can. And men basically want women who can't live without them.

I'm no connoisseur of wines, but I know what's bad.

When you've loved somebody for a long time, and then it stops, it's akin to an amputation in that you go on feeling the cut-off part long after it's been taken away. All sorts of nervous and emotional impulses set out to travel to their accustomed stations, and when they come up against the new, raw barrier, they're carried through it by their own impetus, and only then, finding themselves shooting through empty space, do they dwindle and die away.

Charlie had been doing something to the hedge; it was not exactly trimmed, but its disorder was now angular instead of bunchy.

If the ending is messy, one doesn't remember anything good about any of it.

Work, that supposed panacea, the great Taker-of-Your-Mind-Off, proved just about as totally useless and in fact irrelevant as those 'Easy Childbirth' theories are in the face of the real thing.

I put my chin up and tried to stiffen my upper lip, but found I didn't seem to have any muscles in it.

Even to be impaled by a happy fate makes you jerk against the knowledge of inevitability, of final commitment.

Funny to think that he would certainly have done it, only a week ago, without thinking about the dangers.

If'n Ya Wanna Go Back

other brave get …" He gave Boone's head a sharp, possessive pat and straightened up. "Dance finish. You take dead braves, plasstic. Put in ground." "Little Bear, I can't now. I must go with Emma. Did—did you see her? She—she saw you. I have to make sure she—helps, and doesn't tell.

I know what is wrong. You havn't decided what you want.' She'd underlined this many times. 'Terribly important to draw up a balance sheet every now and then, debits and credits. Decide what's important, what's worth fighting for. Don't drift, ever. Decide then act. If you fail well at least you tried. Don't know what you want so can't advise you how to get it. ? Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room

I know what is wrong. You haven't decided what you want. She'd underlined this many times. Terribly important to draw up a balance sheet every now and then, debits and credits. Decide what's important, what's worth fighting for. Don't drift, ever. Decide then act. If you fail well at least you tried. ? Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room

I learned that 'confession' doesn't ease the soul, but challenges it

But there are, I was learning, different landscapes in the country of love.

After that, of course, though he recovered later, nobody was about to believe any tales he had to tell about little live men.

Ax? Dent? Enemy dent head with tomahawk?

His mother had often talked about the way certain books called you when you were really engrossed in them and to put them down.

Indian and everything else, away. So Omri had had to keep it secret, and