Quotes from Susan Cooper

And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time.

Every human being who loves another loves imperfection, for there is no perfect being on this earth--nothing is so simple as that.

He was among trees then, spring trees tender with the new matchless green of young leaves, and a clear sun dappling them; summer trees full of leaf, whispering, massive; dark winter firs that fear no master and let no light brighten their woods. He learned the nature of all trees, the particular magics that are in oak and beech and ash.

There was something about Great-Uncle Merry that was like the hills, or the sea, or the sky; something ancient, but without age or end.

For him, Halloween was not All Hallows Eve

But the slice-of-life novel is really not so much a world apart as an interlude - like the conference or the film set, the holiday hotel or the voyage by sea or air. You enter it, you live there for a while, you leave again. Perhaps it will alter you; usually it will not. I suspect that the book which takes you into a world apart must also _trouble_ you, at least a little. And the troubling stays with you, like the grit in the oyster, and afterwards you are changed.

If you are concerned for the future of our civilization, there is no more cheering sight than a boy or girl who is lost in a book. It's an image I cling to, in moments of depression: the absorbed child, reading.

The Age of the Screen isn't going to go away; indeed it offers all kinds of wonderful possibilities, if it could just acquire a little more quality control. But there is one truth, one necessary dictum, that we must never forget: _Every child should be encouraged to read books, words on a page, for his or her own pleasure, in his own time, dreaming his own - and the author's - dream_. There is no substitute. None.

First of all, you have heard me talk of Logres. It was the old name for this country, thousands of years ago; in the old days when the struggle between good and evil was more bitter and open than it is now. That struggle goes on all round us all the time, like two armies fighting. And sometimes one of them seems to be winning and sometimes the other, but neither has ever triumphed altogether. Nor ever will," he added softly to himself, "for there is something of each in every man.

But if you work and care and are watchful, as we have tried to be for you, then in the long run the worse will never, ever, triumph over the better.

She understood about the comfort you can get from a small separate world, whether it's a theatre or a basketball team or the inside of a book.

The Three Elders of the World,' he said, 'are the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, the Eagle of Gwernabwy, and the Blackbird of Celli Gadarn.

In the name of King Arthur, and of the old world before the dark came.

maybe because the dark can only reach people at the extremes-- those bound by their own shiny ideas or locked up in the darkness of their own heads.

No, he didn't win," Great-Uncle Merry said, and even in the clear afternoon sunshine he seemed with every word to become more remote, as ancient as the rock behind him and the old world of which he spoke.

The children stared at him, awed and a little afraid. For a moment he was a stranger, someone they did not know. Jane had a sudden fantastic feeling that Great-Uncle Merry did not really exist at all, and would vanish away if they breathed or spoke.

People seemed to me to fill life with shadows that should not be there.

Great-Uncle Merry stopped reading; but the children sat as still and speechless as if his voice still rang on. The story seemed to fit so perfectly into the green land rolling below them that it was as if they sat in the middle of the past.

The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world.

the sky dark with wheeling birds.

They could smell a strangeness in the breeze that blew faintly on their faces down the hill; a beckoning smell of salt and seaweed and excitement.

They are English," Merriman said. "Quite right," said Will's father. "Splendid in adversity, tedious when safe. Never content, in fact. We're an odd lot.

Writing is one of the loneliest professions in the world because it has to be practiced in this very separate private world, in _here_. Not in the mind; in the imagination. And I think it is possible that the writing of fantasy is the loneliest job of the lot, since you have to go further inside. You have to make so close a connection with the unconscious that the unbiddable door will open and the images fly out, like birds.

Words stretch the muscles of the imagination. Continual placid acceptance of ready-made visual images turns the imagination into a couch-potato.