Quotes from David Almond

We thought a little longer, and in the end we simply called her Joy.

I do think there is evil. But it is very rare. It is as rare as true goodness. And just as true goodness produces rare saints, true evil produces rare monsters. The rest of us are semi-good, semi-bad, and we live our lives in a kind of half-happy, half-sad daze. We might hope that one sunny morning we find ourselves in the presence of a saint. And we must pray that we do not encounter the monster.

The season of evil, I echoed. Protect your soul.

All of us can do what we like." "No we can't. You're stupid if you think so.

The body is soft, beautiful, vulnerable. It's easy to threaten it. It's easy to harm it. It takes next to nothing to cause pain, to draw blood, to break bones. Takes next to nothing to blast a body to bits. It's much harder to protect it, she says, and much more important.

Mum has made a little model of Dad - it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do.

I love afternoons like that, like when we talk about things like metempsychosis, when we learn so much, and explore so much, and ideas grow and take flight, like the idea about the universe and the egg. I love being home-schooled, when we don't have to stick to subjects and timetables and rules.

Maybe we were mad that day. Maybe some of the things that seemed to happen didn't really happen at all. Maybe many of the things that seemed to happen in the days and weeks that followed didn't really happen. Maybe it was all because we were young, and because being young is like being mad. Maybe just being human, at any age, is a bit like being mad. But maybe the best things that we do, and the best things that we are, come from madness.

Death is knowing you're about to die,' says Mam. It's seeing the dead and seeing the living all at once. It's wanting not to die and not to live. It's wanting to stay with the last breath when the dead and the living are all around you, and touching you, and whispering, It's all right, Mam. Everything's all right. But there's no way of staying with the last breath. You have to die.

The letters make words and words make us.

Follow me, one word then another, one sentence then another, one death then another. Don't hesitate. Keep moving forward with me through the night. It won't take long. Don't look back.

Time's Flying," said Dad. He Smiled. He pointed to the air. "There it is, flying past! Catch it!" And he jumped, and caught Time in his hands, and showed it to Lizzie. She took it from him, and threw it up again. "There it goes," she called. "Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Time!

If you can imagine doing something, then you can do it.

more 27 and 53,'i said. 'Food of the gods,' he said

How can you turn yourself into something you want to be when you're alredy what you are?

Maybe poets get to you best when you're sort of dreaming, when you're hardly there at all.

You must live in peace," he told us. "We are only in this world for a short period of vivid and wonderful waking in an eternity of dreamless dark.

In the end she just said..... All I did was to run away for a few minutes! All I wanted was to be free!

The world will be our oyster. We'll be wandering stars. We'll be footloose and free.

We are all wanderers and travellers, refugees and pilgrims until we return once more to the stars.

It needn't look like any particular thing at all. How could we imagine that we could make a world as perfect and as lovely as the world that God has made? All we can do is to do our best. Paint and draw. Create your own beautiful imperfect world.

We roamed between the angels and the eagles. Bats flickered against the starry sky. Moonlight poured down

It's called evolution. You must know that. Yes, we are.' She looked up from her book. 'I would hope, though,' she went on, 'that we also have some rather more beautiful ancestors. Don't you?' --Mina

We come into the world out of the dark. We haven't got a clue where we've come from. We've got no idea where we're going. But while we're here in the world, if we're brave enough, we flap our wings and fly.