Quotes from Eva Ibbotson

What are you afraid of then? Not Being able to see, I think not seeing because your obsessed by something that blots out the world.

Please, God,' Ruth would pray, 'don't let me be competitive. Let me realize what a privilege it is to study. Let me remember that knowledge must be pursued for its own sake and please, please stop me wanting to beat Verena Plackett in the exams.' She prayed hard and she meant what she said. But God was busy that autumn as the International Brigade came back, defeated, from Spain, Hitler's bestialities increased, and sparrows everywhere continued to fall.

To show too much joy in a place such as this would be unseemly but, as he padded toward her, his tail was extended in a manner which would make wagging possible should all go as expected.

She stood looking carefully at the labeled portraits Ursala had put up: Little Crow, Chief of the Santees, Geronimo, last of the Apaches, and Ursala's favorite, Big Foot, dying in the snow at Wounded Knee. Isn't that where the massacre was? asked Ellen. Yes. I'm going to go there when I'm grown up. To Wounded Knee. That seems sensible, said Ellen.

Adventures, once they were over, were things that had to stay inside one--that no one else could quite understand.

It was a lovely church - one of those places which look as though God might be about to give a marvellous party.

Those who think of the Amazon as a Green Hell ," she read in an old book with a tattered spine, " bring only their own fears and prejudices to this amazing land. For whether a place is a hell or a heaven rests in yourself, and those who go with courage and an open mind may find themselves in Paradise.

One can always bear what is right.

Herr Altenburg, I can't; I have vertigo.' And Marek looked at him: 'All right - I'll get the chemist to fix me something.

The world was so beautiful in those days, Annika. The music, the flowers, the scent of pines..." "It still is," said Annika. "Honestly, it still is.

But of course he knew, all of them knew. There is only one kind of a person a wizard can marry, and that is a witch.

The dowager rose and slipped from her pew. There was the sound of tearing silk as she threw up her arms to embrace her son. Then: "Oh, Rupert, darling," she exclaimed in tones of theatrical despair, "don't you see? The game's up!

That's silly, Anna," said the Honorable Olive. "Being afraid is silly, you know it is.

Dostoyevsky was her brother, Victorian children's books her passion and though she lived, when in funds, mainly on avocado pears, she took her bath each night with a different cookery book.

It was a night to dream about: windless, warm and scented, with a streak of gold and amethyst still lingering in the sky.

There are those who dance the notes and those who dance the music.

Tessa] knew about phantom limbs [....] Her cheek, where the Englishman's fingers had been, did not exactly ache ... but very strangely, most curiously ... it felt.

Anyone who has an egg to watch over has a stake in the future, and the future--they were sure of it--was going to be good .

Once the hag got upset she was apt to go downhill very fast and remember things like she was an orphan. People are often orphans when they are eighty-two, but it is true that when you have no mother or father you can feel very lonely at any age.

It is a fearful thing to love what time can touch.

Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.

As Maia turned to go, hardly believing that there could be such happiness, she heard a loud splash. Miss Minton was leaning over the side, watching the parcel she had held on her knees floating away downriver. "What was that?" asked Maia. Miss Minton straightened herself. If you must know," she said, "it was my corset.

Smells are odd things. They follow you about when you're not thinking about them, but when you put your nose to where they ought to be, they aren't there. The

Ms. Wrack's mother, Mrs. Wrack, had been a mermaid: a proper one who lived on a rock and combed her hair and sang. But sailors had never been lured to their doom by her, partly because she looked like the back of a bus and partly because modern ships are so high out of the water that they never even saw her