Quotes from Catherine Fisher

Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams.

Finn smiled ruefully. "I'm a Prisoner, old man. Just like you.

I hate her." Merlin laughed, tossing the stick down. "Not so. You have forgotten how to love. That's a different sorrow.

He worked night and day. He made a coat that would transform him; he would be more than a man; a winged creature, beautiful as light. All the birds brought him feathers. Even the eagle. Even the swan.

It's safe to tell a secret to one. Risky to tell it to two. To tell it to three is thoughtless folly, everyone else will know.

When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.

None of us have much idea where we are. Perhaps all our lives are too concerned with where, and not enough with who.

The Art Magicke has rules. It means I have to teach you all my tricks. All the substitutions, the replications, the illusions. How to read minds and palms and leaves. How to disappear and reappear. "How to saw people in half?" "That too." "Nice.

All my life I have dreamed of you.

Shadow turned. Her eyes were wet; she smiled at him wanley. "I'll be she loved you.

We forbid growth and therefore decay. Ambition, and therefore despair. Because each is only the warped relection of the other.

Chloe turned to Vetch. The poet said gently, "You see, you do have power. Words give you power, to create or destroy." His eyes flickered to Clare. "Even to forgive...

And the poets?' 'Lost in dreams of other worlds.'... 'And the wise, who made this world?' The swan lowered its black neck sadly. 'Dwindled to crones and sorcerers in towers.

Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.

Sapphique strapped the wings to his arms and flew, over oceans and plains, over glass cities and mountains of gold. Animals fled; people pointed up. He flew so far, he saw the sky above him and the sky said, "Turn back, my son, for you have climbed too high." Sapphique laughed, as he rarely did. "Not this time. This time I beat on you until you open." But Incarceron was angered, and struck him down.

Shut up!" Finn turned, furious. "Look at you both! The only friends I have in this hell and all you can do is fight over me. Do either of you care about me? Not the seer, the fighter, the fool who takes all the risks, but me, Finn?

In great ceremony they entered the prison. They were never to be seen again.

She turned to Vetch and he caught her hands as they reached out for him. "I wanted power, I always wanted it, but it's stronger than I am! I can't control the Unworld, Vetch, or the real world either. I can't make it do what I want! The forest is too strong." Vetch crouched, his narrow face close to hers. "You will, Chloe. I promise you." He glanced at Mac. "Ask him. God gives no one a gift he cannot master. Right, Priest?

or is it that man contains within himself the seeds of evil? That even if he is placed in a paradise perfectly formed for him he will poison it, slowly, with his own jealousies and desires?

They came out. They were children. They wore rags and their skin was livid with sores. Their veins were tubes, their hair wire. Sapphique reached out and touched them. 'You are the ones who will save us,' he said.

None of us know who we are any more.

If a speculum is polished sufficiently, it becomes invisible. For it doth reflect all about it, so that the eye sees only that which is shown , not the devyse that showeth it. And if a man becomes hard as diamond, faceted and flawed, he too will show nothing of himself, onlie the fractured images of his world.

Understanding's not enough. Understanding's from outside; merely a function of the mind. [. . .] To enter, that's the secret. To become the bridge, to crawl into its sap, to sway with it, to rot over centuries as its heartwood rots. When you are the bridge you will know what the bridge knows. It takes time. A lifetime. And skill.

Because sometime, somehow, the god spoke your name. You took a step too far and here you are. None of us can ever go back. Even if we wanted to.