Quotes from John Bellairs

Unexplained noises are best left unexplained.

He invented the Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who popped out at you from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed, "Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!" Lewis was not scared by the little man, and he felt that those who scream "Dreeb" are more to be pitied than censured.

He held the book up to his nose. It smelled like Old Spice talcum powder. Books that smelled that way were usually fun to read. He threw the book onto his bed and went to his suitcase. After rummaging about for awhile, he came up with a long, narrow box of chocolate-covered mints. He loved to eat candy while he read, and lots of his favorite books at home had brown smudges on the corners of the pages.

To fuss is human; to rant, divine!

Then there's no point in our being logical, is there?" said Jonathan... "What do you mean?" said Lewis and Mrs. Zimmerman at the same time. "I mean," he said patiently, "that we're no good at that sort of game. Our game is wild swoops, sudden inexplicable discoveries, cloudy thinking. Knights' jumps instead of files of rooks plowing across the board. So we'd better play our way if we expect to win.

There was one big rule in life - the things you worried about never happened, and the things that happened were never the ones you expected. Not that this bit of advice helped Johnny much. It simply meant that he spent more time guessing at what the unexpected disasters in his life would be.

St. Fidgeta is the patroness of nervous and unmanageable children. Her shrine is the church of Santa Fidgeta in Tormento, near Fobbio in southern Italy. There one may see the miraculous statues of St. Fidgeta, attributed to the Catholic Casting Company of Chicago, Illinois. The statue has been seen to squirm noticeably on her feast day, and so on that day restless children from all over Europe have been dragged to the shrine by equally nervous, worn-out, and half-mad parents.

The professor believed in thought. He was always telling his students that you could get to the unknown by using the known. If you just put the facts that you knew together in the proper way, you might get some truly amazing results.

He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest

I'm good at tailing people. I was an intelligence officer during World War I. My code name was the Crab." - Roderick Childermass

You can't prepare for all the disasters that might occur in this frightening world of ours. If the devil appears or if we find that the End of the World is at hand, we'll do something.

If I were serious I would never have become a wizard, would I?

On a shelf over the experiment table there was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put their to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist.

Whatever you think you are, that's what you are

Ages. But this is just the kind of thing that a town like Cairo, Illinois, would peddle as a souvenir. They pronounce it Kay-ro, by the way. It's a town way down in the southern part of Illinois, and it happens to have the same name as the capital of modern-day Egypt.

He was going to live with his Uncle Jonathan, whom he had never met in his life. Of course, Lewis had heard a few things about Uncle Jonathan, like that he smoked and drank and played poker. These were not such bad things in a Catholic family, but Lewis had two maiden aunts who were Baptists, and they had warned him about Jonathan.

But all the while, in the back of his mind, he carried around the memory of the eerie scene that had been played before his eyes in that dark back room in the Fitzwilliam Inn.

Oh, by the way," he said, "you might bring Lewis a glass of iced tea, and get me a refill. No sugar. And bring out another plate of chocolate-chip cookies." Mrs. Zimmermann stood up and clasped her hands subserviently in front of her. "How would you like your cookies, sir? Stuffed down your throat one by one, or crumbled up and sifted into your shirt collar?

Tarby was a popular boy, and he was used to being right about everything.

He loved to eat candy while he read, and lots of his favorite books at home had brown smudges on the corners of the pages.

Lots of nuns around lately. Suppose there's a convention or something?" – Alaric or Leo.

I learned that spell fifty years ago,' he mumbled as he lit his pipe. 'And I still don't know what it's for.

Yes, Mom, we're trying to save the world from a crazy guy who's using magic statues to cause terrible weather.

The two weary but still talkative wizards sat in a pair of fan-backed chairs and pitched pebbles at the drunken satyr in the fountain. They talked about wars, enchantments, and obscure facts until the sky above the forest began to be fringed with pale blue.