Quotes from Philip Reeve

I don't think we are cut out to be evil sorcerers, brothers," said Fentongoose. "If we were truly evil, we would not feel such sorrow at the deaths of our friends. We would just go, 'Ha! Ha! Ha!' or something.

He was going to miss everything. But he guessed that was how everybody always felt. 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.

He cut through the Twenty-First Century gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal-headed gods of lost America.

Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn't been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.

Uncle knows best. -All the Lost Boys

She was fifteen years old and her life pinched her like an ill-fitting shoe.

Som i det gamla ordspråket: 'På en rullande stad växer ingen mossa ...

I am Nom-O-Tron,' said the machine, in a big, boomy voice, so loud that Astra was afraid her mum and dad or some other grown-ups would hear and come to see who was sneaking a bedtime snack. 'Shhh!' she said. 'Have you got any biscuits?

They seemed simple people, and he imagined that their society had no machines at all, but as they brought him through the town gates he saw delicate airborne ships of wood and glass rising like dragonflies from tall stone mooring-towers. Silvery discs, like misty mirrors, swivelled and pivoted on their undersides, and the air beneath them rippled like a heat-haze.

Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn't notice.

Elementary, my dear colonel,' she said. 'When every sensible explanation has been disproved, then whatever remains, however silly, must be the truth.

Hon är själv fånge i sitt eget fängelse.

Ni känner väl till släkten Pennyroyals motto: 'När det hettar till gömmer sig förståndigt folk under stora möbler'?

Most of the time he didn't even bother to look back at the boy struggling along behind him on his weary pony. He just tossed words over his shoulder and expected Ansel to catch them.

Even Cynthia had to remember she was playing deaf and stop herself from crying out.

And again that strange half-memory brushed mothlike against the Stalker's mind, the Once-born called Tom kneeling over it in snow and saying, "Miss Fang! It's not fair! He waited until you were dazzled!" For a moment it felt an odd satisfaction, as though it had returned a favor.

What, not even a driver?" asked Wren, focusing on the black, electric locomotive at the front of the train, a blunt, windowless thing, charging along like a bull. "The engine is the driver. A Popjoy Mark Twelve Stalker, controlled by a Resurrected human brain.

the Jenny Haniver was repaired. He put his hand flat on the chart table and let the steady throb of Anchorage's engines beat against his palm, and it felt like home. In a cheap hotel behind Wolverinehampton's air-quay Widgery Blinkoe's five wives turned five

Then, beaming at Tom and Caul, he topped up their glasses with more wine to wash down the pack of half-truths and outright lies he'd fed them

It was bigger than he remembered, and much uglier. Strange, how when he lived there he had believed everything the Goggle-screens told him about the city's elegant lines, its perfect beauty. Now he saw that it was ugly; no better than any other town, just bigger; a stormfront of smoke and belching chimneys, a wave of darkness rolling towards the mountains with the white villas of High London surfing on its crest like some delicate ship. It didn't look like home.

You have to take the long view, Tom. It isn't only Traction Cities which poison the air and tear up the earth. All cities do that, static or mobile. It's human beings that are the problem. Everything that they do pollutes and destroys.

I love history, Tom. All those old things people dig up. Just ordinary things that were once used by ordinary people, but made special by time.

He said his name was Kobi Chen-Tulsi. He said, "Tell Threnody Noon that the Prells are going to attack Grand Central." - The Crystal Horizon

They're Hive Monks,' said Nova.