Quotes from Philip Reeve

His tunic lay on the mud nearby, but he couldn't find his shirt at all, until he crawled closer to the scarred girl and realized that she was busily tearing it into strips which she was using to bandage her wounded leg. "Hey!" he said. "That's one of my best shirts!" "So?" she replied without looking up. "It's one of my best legs.

We must find you a new boyfriend, Wavey had kept telling her, but what if a girlfriend was what Fever needed? She felt as if she had opened the door to a room she had never noticed in a house where she'd lived all her life.

Personally, he much preferred to get them chatting. People were generally much less inclined to want to kill you once you'd chatted for a bit, and if they weren't, well, at least you could use the time to think of an escape plan.

Its a town eat town world

They're only stories," he would say, "What do stories matter?" But he wasn't stupid. He knew as well as Myrddin that in the end stories are all that matter.

It would be best to stride in with a cheer "hello!", but she wasn't the cheery sort; she was the "lurking in dark corners" sort. She found a dark corner, behind the Stalker-cases, and lurked.

Waste not, want not' is the Engineers' motto, Miss. Properly processed human ordure makes very useful fuel for our city's engines. And we are experimenting with ways of turning it into a tasty and nutritious snack. We feed our prisoners on nothing else. Unfortunately they keep dying. But that is just a temporary setback, I'm sure.

you can't keep children in the nursery forever. If you do, they never become grown-ups, but they're not really children either. They are just pets.

Uncle knows best.

And isn't that what all boys want and all men, too? Just to be taken seriously?

The small lives of women don't make for good stories. That's why there were no girls in the stories Myrddin told, unless they were there as a prize for the hero to win at the end of his adventures.

But the look on his face was so strange that I hadn't the heart to take his story away from him. He believed it, see. He believed the old gods were on Arthur's side just as he believed that winter would follow autumn and the sun would rise tomorrow. And I thought that maybe that believing would make him strong and brave and lucky when the fighting came, and maybe without it he'd be killed, or turn and run away, which was worse than being killed. So I kept quiet.

He ran across the main hall and down galleries full of things that had somehow survived through all the millennia since the Ancients destroyed themselves in that terrible flurry of orbit-to-earth atomics and tailored-virus bombs called the Sixty Minute War.

I thought you'd say it might be a trap.' 'It might be trap,' he said. 'It doesn't feel like a trap.' 'Well it wouldn't, would it? Not if it was a good trap.

Outside, Melliphant's ear flattened itself against the wood of the door like a pale slug.

What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. "Good practice for life," Uncle said. "Hard knocks, that's all the world's about!" But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return.

Golrandonvar?' asked the Doctor. 'No, it doesn't ring a bell, I'm afraid. But then I've visited such a lot of places … Did it look a bit like a gravel pit? You'd be amazed how many alien worlds look just like gravel pits …

Everyone was losing things, leaving things behind, clinging to old memories as they rushed into the future. Everyone was a passenger on a runaway train. It was true that Zen would be going farther than most. But at least he didn't

I have had it with these dumb cakes on this dumb spaceship!

Friends don't leave friends behind to wash dishes for yetis!

These are new worlds, Zen. We don't have to be what we were any more. We can be anything that we want. We can be humans together. - Nova

Nobody wants trouble,' said Chandni. 'Trouble just find us.

All it wants is to explode.' 'Nice to have an ambition in life, I suppose.

He was just a rich city boy who enjoyed playing pirates and had never expected anyone to stand up to him. He'd come looking for a fight, and now that a fight had found him he didn't know what to do with it.