Quotes from Philip Reeve

I've been operating undercover to discover her whereabouts. All that stuff you read in the papers was just a ruse, designed to make the enemy think I was in disgrace. I've actually been working for the Murnauer

How should I remember the child's name? It was fifteen, sixteen years ago and I have never liked babies; nasty creatures, leak at both ends and have no respect for ceramics.

Sometimes, on our way through the world, we meet someone who touches our heart in a way others don't.

You aren't a hero and I'm not beautiful and we probably won't live happily ever after " she said. "But we're alive and together and we're going to be all right.

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine, and stumbled into the path of a religious procession - celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet, 'Hari, Hari! Hari Potter!'

Is it...dead?" asked Tom, his voice all quivery with fright. "A town just ran over him," said Hester. "I shouldn't think he's very well...

The one thing worse than an enemy is a friend turned false.

he cut through the 21st Century Gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal headed gods of lost America

That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.

Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you knew about straight away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head-over-heels with someone quite unexpected

The old curator of ceramics lay near the door, looking indignant, as if death was a silly modern fad that he rather disapproved of.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

Hey!" he said. "That's one of my best shirts!" "So?" she replied without looking up. "It's one of my best legs.

An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!

He smiled faintly, like somebody who had never seen a smile, but had read a book on how to do it.

She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backward to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother's star charts like the map of a new constellation.

Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.

The trouble with space is, there's so much of it. An ocean of blackness without any shore. A neverending nothing. And here, all alone in the million billion miles of midnight, is one solitary moving speck. A fragile parcel filled with sleeping people and their dreams.

I felt a little like saying 'Eeeeeeeeek!' myself, but seeing Myrtle so afraid reminded me that I was British, and must be brave.

You know, sometimes a thing, a system, a creation grows so old, and corrupt, and weighed down by its own baggage, that all you can do is change it. Move on. Start afresh. It's frightening, but it has to be done.

Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore, except in Africa, and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew of Christians was that they worhsipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to things?

That's impossible,' said Fever, Engineerishly.

But that's what bravery is, my dear. The overcoming of fear. If you're not afraid, it doesn't count.