Quotes from Russell Hoban

Stil it takes you strange walking in your old foot steps like that. Putting your groan up foot where your chyld foot run nor dint know nothing what wer coming.

All roads, whether long or short, are hard, said Frog. Come, you have begun your journey, and all else necessarily follows from that act. Be of good cheer. The sun is bright. The sky is blue. The world lies before you.

If we'd been edible we'd never have lasted this long.

Oh, yes, said Mother, you may be sure that there will always be plenty of chocolate cake around here.

Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn't at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing.

What do you do when you're wound up?' she asked. 'Do you play that drum?'. 'No,' said the child. 'We used to dance.' 'But now we walk,' said the father. 'And behind us an enemy walks faster.' 'That's life,' said Euterpe.

What is all this talk of elephants and seals?' asked Frog. 'It's nonsense', said the father, 'and yet it's not the child's fault. Our motor is in me. He fills the empty space inside himself with foolish dreams that cannot possibly come true'.

But more and more I think that madness is the world's natural condition and to expect anything else is madness compounded.

Seed of the little Seed of the wyld Seed of the berning is Hart of the chyld . . . Out goes the candl Out goes the lite Out goes my story And so Good Nite

I've seen a film in which Dr Lorenz pointed out the difference between two colonies of cattle egrets, one free and one caged. The free ones, who had to provide for themselves, were monogamous and energetic and kept their numbers within ecologically reasonable limits. The captive egrets were promiscuous, idle, overbreeding and presumably going to hell fast.

Here below the surface one studies the depths of TO BE, as manifest in AM, IS, and ARE. And if you don't hold up your end of the conversation I may very well snap you in two.

People ask me how I got from St Eustace to Riddley Walker and all I can say is that it's a matter of being friends with your head. Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things; there are places that can heighten your responses, and if you let your head go its own way it might, with luck, make interesting connections. On March 14th, 1974 I got lucky.

Dont you know if you keap getting a head of your self youwl jus only fall over your self when you get to where youre going?

The mouse and his child, who had learned so much and had prevailed against such overwhelming odds, never could be persuaded to teach a success course. Popular demand was intense, but they steadfastly refused. The whole secret of the thing, they insisted, was simply and at all costs to move steadily ahead, and that, they said, could not be taught.

Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.

We've tried the other way; we've tried making both things and people It, and we've seen the results.

How do you stay cheerful?' I said. 'I don't mind being alive,' he said.

We make fiction because we are fiction ... It lived us into being and it lives us still.

He's taken half of our savings,' said his mother. 'If we lived without using the savings before,' said Boaz-Jachin, 'we can live without the half that he has taken.

Time's arrow points one way only. Even the moment just past cannot be returned to.

Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying.

Before the motorcar replaced the horse, and for some years after there were many illustrators who drew horses with the same authority with which they drew the human figure; now there are very few who can do that. Most modern illustraters fudge a horse the best they can and hope to get on by the technique.

This is the real thing,' said Caroline. 'It's the deepest, the profoundist. It's the big bazonga, it's really existential.' OK, I said, watching a distant sweeper with a faulty program banging again and again into the information kiosk, 'just don't tell me it's a metaphor, OK?

Wel realy there aint no stilness any where is there. Not 1ce you begin to take noatis.