Quotes from Isobelle Carmody

If she is afraid of mirrors she is afraid of herself.

Cracks especially. You have to be careful of the cracks.. Sometimes they are disguised as something else. A doorway, or a smile or even a winking eye. And if you fall through them, you never know were you will end up.

Only humans think death is evil. But it is nature. Evil exist's only in life. There is much good and evil alloted to each life.

You are born with the yearning arrow, my Glynna, though you are not yet fully aware of it. It is not a happy thing to possess, for nothing on earth - no goal, no person how ever beloved - will answer it. It points to the sky and to the heavens and the stars and when it cannot reach them, it must fall back to pierce your heart.

True sorrows do not pass like clouds or inclement weather...Sorrows are absorbed over time, and you reshape yourself around them. How you absorb them makes you what you are for good or ill. I think the only true and right way is to take our sorrows into us bravely and wholly, knowing they will hurt, and accepting that sometimes pain is unavoidable. It is when grief is suppressed or hidden that it does harm

She's forgetting,' Ellen said to Jack, plumping herself down on a chair. 'All of her life is leaking out of her. Soon there will be nothing left.

Impatience is not the least of your faults, Malik, it is a kind of greed and someday it may see you undone.

Many truths which are not believed are called lies,' the Laughing Beast said. 'Mirrors do not themselves lie unless they have been enchanted. Ordinary mirrors merely reflect what is revealed to them. People lie and mirrors reflect people. If your mother feared mirrors in your land, she feared herself.

Laughter is a powerful weapon for it carries the light. To laugh is to defy the darkness.

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

What's your name?' 'Names!' she sniffed, rolling her eyes. 'People always want names, don't they? They're mad about naming. I will let the moment name me.' she eyed Jack expectantly. 'You want me to name you?' he asked. 'People from the other side are very dull,' she sighed. 'Give yourself a name for me. I don't need naming for myself, do I?

The very shape of our dreams defines us. We learn about the world and try out our thoughts and visions in them. Our dreams goad us and drive us and summon and sustain us and when we are old they comfort us. Magic is a kind of dream, and love is a dream, and hope is a dream. Without our dreams, there is no sweetness, no purpose to life.

If human lives be, for their very brevity, sweet, then beast lives are sweeter still...

It would be a simple matter if lives were lived by hindsight,' Rushton said. 'There is much we would not begin, if we could see how it would end.

It is interesting that the worst retellings of traditional fairy tales are those that heavy-handedly take the step of making a moral point.