Quotes from Mal Peet

I'm so angry,' she said. 'I was all right until you came back. I'd given up. So many terrible things. Relatives, neighbors disappearing. Opa. The bloody Germans coming to...to strip us bare. Oma's silence. Bam, bam, bam. Like being punched over and over again. You get numb. It doesn't hurt anymore. Unless you start to hope. That's the trick, you see: you can take anything unless you start to hope.

Algebra messed up one of those divisions between things that help you make sense of the world and keep it tidy. Letters make words; figures make numbers. They had no business getting tangled up together.

I can explain to you why algebra is useful. But that is not what algebra is really for.' He moved his fingers gently on my temples. 'It's to keep what is in here healthy. PE for the head. And the great thing is you can do it sitting down.

Grandad taught me that the alien signs and symbols of algebraic equations were not just marks on paper. They were not flat. They were three-dimensional, and you could approach them from different directions, look at them from different ways, stand them on their heads. You could take them apart and put them back together in a variety of shapes, like Legos. I stopped being scared of them.

Let me tell you something. When there is a penalty kick, most people think that the penalty taker is in control. But they are wrong. The penalty taker is full of fear, because he is expected to score. He is under great pressure. He has many choices to make, and as he places the ball and walks back to make his run, his mind is full of the possibility of failure. This makes him vulnerable, and it makes the keeper very powerful.

Freedom had no place in the Soviet System. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn't do at all.

We should just bomb them back to the Stone Age.

As much use as tits on a fish.

Fluke me, Murdstone.

Gone are the days when you simply write a jolly good book and wait for the queues to form. Readers need to be friended, darling. They need to be subscribers. They need to be followers.

Wagstaff was a trim little man in a dark-blue uniform with an armband embroidered with the words CIVIL DEFENSE. "Thank you, Headmaster, and good morning, young gentlemen. Yesterday, as I'm sure you'll remember, I spoke to you about the ways you can help your parents prepare their homes against the possibility of nuclear attack." Clem grinned, noting Tash Harmsworth's scowl. Tash was a bugger for an incorrect proposition.

But when I stood there and saw that the end of the journey was as vague and unreachable as the beginning had been, I realized I didn't care. No, more than that: I was relieved. I didn't want an ending, didn't want to get to the full stop of our story.

The thing about the Nazis," Ruud said, "is that they're paranoid, but they never see what's right under their noses. If they did, Hitler wouldn't wear that bloody silly little moustache.

The screen filled with a pure and simple blue in which a few black pixels floated.

In London, I was unique. But down here, where I was a bungalow one minute and a funeral parlour the next, I felt as thought I was dissolving. I mean, if you're everywhere, you're nowhere. If you're everything, you're nothing.

Keeper had shifted the limits of my world, or maybe simply rubbed them out. Now, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he was preparing to take a free kick at me. It

If you weren't here and Oma died, I'd deal with it. Because there'd be nothing more to lose. It'd be just me. But now it's different; it's worse. Because you're yet another person to lose. You do stupid, dangerous things, and every time you go away, I pray in agony that you'll come back. It's unfair. Hope is pulling me to pieces. I can't stand it.

The US military and the CIA got busy working on plans for the conquest of Cuba. And it would be no Mickey Mouse boat operation this time. This time, Fidel Castro and his hairy henchmen would find out what it felt like to have American fighter-bombers drop the fires of hell on their heads three hundred times a day.

Shit! Those sons a bitches Russians!

The view from here was lovely, constant, and never the same. Somehow, it was always sympathetic to his mood.

The USA and the Soviet Union each had the ability to annihilate the other. Therefore- in theory at least-neither of these growling superpowers would dare attack the other, because to do so would result in its own immolation.

Kennedy was not perfectly sure that Khrushchev was an entirely rational being. He was not absolutely certain that the Soviet Union wouldn't be happy to rule a world that was half toxic ash.

It still, after all these years, puts frost into my blood to remember that men like LeMay and Powers had their fingers so close to the button.

I can't write that dreadful hobbity stuff. I just simply... can't.