Quotes from Meg Rosoff

So much relies on one person assuming the other is telling the truth. If a person can lie to you about one thing, he can lie about something else.

That was it. I never bothered filling in the details. The details didn't matter.

It might go down better than appearing as a giant reptile encased in a ball of fire and forcing yourself on her.' 'WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BRING THAT UP?

This was what happiness felt like - this wondrous, miraculous alternative to dread.

It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.

Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.

I was starting to think that except for the deli counters and five or ten thousand other total essentials, supermarkets were pretty much a waste of time.

I mean, why? Why did I go on believing? Did it make sense? Why did I go on thinking, even when [he] slammed me around, that if you are good enough, patient enough, for long enough, your reward will come?

it was love, of course, though I didn't know it then and Finn was both its subject and object. He accepted love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions, like a wild thing glimpsed through trees.

If you have the patience to wait and watch, history will reshape truth (weakest of all forces, and weightless) in the image of opinion. What really happened will cease to matter and, eventually, cease to exist.

I love you. I'm madly in love with you. Well, madly obviously, given I'm mad as a mudlark. But you saved my life. I'd be dead without you. And you're so good to me. And you love me too. How lucky is that? Amazing! Amazingly lucky. I can't live without you. You're my lucky charm." She felt a sudden desire to kill Justin's well-meaning friend.

Life's pleasures were so simple, really. It was all a matter of appreciating what you had - and knowing that things could always be worse.

So much of translating, Gil once told me, takes place in an imaginary space where the writer and the translator come together. It is not necessary to sympathize with the writer, to agree with what he's written. But it is necessary to walk alongside and stay in step. It's harder, he says, when the other person has a bad limp or stops and starts all the time or moves erratically. It is hardest of all when the story comes from a place the translator himself can't go.

I've noticed that the magic getting along with someone isn't really magic. If you break it down, you can see how it happens. You say something a bit off-center and see if they react. If they get it, they push it a bit further. Then it's your turn again. And theirs. And so on, until it's banter. Once it's banter, it's friendship.

Eck nodded, a bit uncertainly. He supposed that in the absence of a future, a friend might be nice.

she sometimes makes me think of a planet rocketing along in a parallel universe

The featureless trundle of my existence began to change. At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an idea. Another person. An idea of a person

That's it," Piper said. "That's the end." But I knew it wasn't. They'd left out a chapter. The one where the hero comes home to find me gone.

Not everything you want to know is explained properly on Google.

Feeling are like three-year-olds. They're not rational. They're just there.

He was a peculiar sight. Tears rolling down his face, shouting to drown the sound of the singing rabbit; he said he needed help, pointed to a chicken, handed over some money, grabbed his parcel and bolted out the door in panic. Boys, thought the butcher. Drugs, thought the woman. Justin Case, thought Dorothea.

When a creature begins to emerge from it's chrysails there is a point at which it is neither one thing nor the other, not quite grown into a new identity nor rid of the old one. It's wings are folded and sticky, it's colours hidden. Whether it will emerge in shades of emerald and lapis lazuli or the colour of mud is yet to be revealed. It is that long, still, moment of waiting that fascinates me utterly. The suspence of waiting for beauty to unfurl.

The startled child gathered his thoughts. I'm not entirely sure what the circumstances are, he said, but as a general rule I try to keep things simple. If I'm clear about what I want, other people have an easier time making me happy. It sounds basic, but most of the time it works. "Duck." He spoke clearly, pointing to a wooden duck.

Bob's talent, such as it is, consists entirely of the few unconscious charms of youth: its energy, audacity and complete inability to recognize its own shortcomings.