Quotes from Colin Meloy

This was all in the making, a long time ago. You had as much control over these events as a leaf does in the time of its falling.

When you get respect from the people who are buying your music and coming to your shows, there's an expectation that you have to live up to your own standards.

I pretty much draw the line when people want you to do original music for commercials.

No-one wants to hear anything spoken in earnest anymore, unless it happens to involve unrequited, teenage love.

I don't feel like we're setting ourselves up to be exclusive. I don't want to set up an attitude where we're telling people 'You can't listen to our music if you don't have a college degree.

And now you have to come out of hiding - even though your life is threatened by a shape-changing assassin - to walk however many miles in a snowstorm to go talk to a tree. Yup. I'm coming with you, said Curtis

Oddly enough, the old mole sported a long white beard, which Curtis didn't recall being something that mole typically did

Sure, Desdemona, at the receptionist's age, and seeing some poor woman in a second-hand gown and a plaster-cast of makeup to cover the encroaching menaces of age - wouldn't she have shot the same withering glance?

She was a well-traveled and worldy mole, this Sibyl

We want more than chocolate cake, said Rachel. We need your help. Jacques seemed unflustered by the girl's sudden impatience. But chocolate cake is a good starting point, oui?

Explosive experts and animal lovers

Can you send in guards? asked Prue. To, you know, get things under control? We tried that, said the attaché. Only gets them more riled up. They start getting oppressed when you do that.

You've lost track of the man inside in your restless need to create things, to amass stuff, to have power. It is the disease of desire, my friend. And it has rotted your soul to the very core

Look at your failed life, Joffrey: It is standing right in front of you

Look at the memory on the turtle!

Grigor, of course, was in bed, having heaped enough blame on himself for his son's death that he could barley rise under the weight

Poor Grigor. His heart simply became too heavy, there in the cavity of his chest.

She quickly exited the room, hearing the echoes of the mastiff's angered barks fade behind her down the hallway. As she walked, she breathed a quick benediction to the patron saint of sleuthing. "Nancy Drew," she whispered, "be with me now." At

First, the explosion of life. Then came the celebration. Such as it had been for generations and generations, as long as the eldest of the eldest could remember; as long as the record books had kept steady score. By the time the first buds were edging their green shoots from the dirt, the parade grounds had been cleared and the maypole had been pulled from its exile in the basement of the Mansion. The board had met and the Queen decided; all that was left was the wait. The wait for May.

As Desdemona continued on about the administrative details of the business, her eyelids lazing at half-mast all the while, Elsie's attention was drawn to the decorations on the office's walls. She had always assumed that dust could only collect on a horizontal surface, but the Unthank Home's drab green walls proved otherwise—a thin sheen of gray dust seemed to nearly act as a second coat of paint.

Septimus, if the ivy needs to consume a human child to become all-powerful, it's safe to assume it's the invasive stuff.

It was a nice relief to be able to work on individual songs.

I think the music should definitely underscore the sentiment of the song, and it can work for or against it.

We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.