It’s different. When you make a house good and strong because it’s your house, a place you made, a place you’re proud of, it’s not at all the same as making it glow for someone who ordered you to do it.
This is a very marvelous thing. A winter thing, when everything is pickled and preserved under glass. You can taste summer in this mixture, summer boiled down and soaked in brine, mummified, packed with spices to be born again on this table, in this place, in this snow.
I didn’t want to do my mathematics homework back home. Or mend the fence or mind the chickens. But I did it anyway. Just because a person doesn’t want to do a thing doesn’t mean they ought to shirk.
Americans all acted like they were trying to pretend they hadn’t just chased a fistful of ecstasy with a noseful of coke to save themselves from a police officer only they could see.
You can’t kiss a girl into anything.
Doors opened at seven, the show started at eight. In pubs and clubs and house parties across the galaxy, the viewers at home were drunk by six.
That’s how kings are made, my brush-tailed girl – they pick a place, shove a stick in it, call themselves King and wait to see if someone gets angry about it. No one has gotten angry so far, so that makes the otters mine.
For the wishes of one’s old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes.
You know how questing goes. You can’t explain it to anyone else; it would be like telling them your dreams.
She certainly did not see Death stand on her tiptoes and blow a kiss after her, a kiss that rushed through all the frosted leaves of the autumnal forest but could not quite catch a child running as fast as she could. As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.
But Fairyland is an old place, and old things have strange hungers.
There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.
Now, in the Kingdom of School, to be asked into another child’s room is like being asked inside their heart.
Magic has a logic, like algebra. Once you get to know it, it’s easy. If this, then that. You write with a pencil, you don’t make frog soup with it.
Things that cannot long be kept secret: death in the family, the loss of a ring, corruption of the spirit, boredom, illicit love. Sickness. Addiction. Pregnancy.
I will always be here, in my old chair by the door, waiting for you, whenever you are lonesome. Our little house will always look just the same as when we first blew the dust off the bookshelves, and the kettle will always be just about to boil. Sometimes I will be young, and sometimes I will be old, sometimes you will be young, and sometimes you will be old. But for as long as forever, I will keep a room for you. I swear by the sparkle in my eye and the spring in your step.
A thing too familiar becomes invisible.
Falling in love is embarrassing. It is not hardcore. It is not part of the scene.
Everyone Is Looking for a Book Strong Enough to Change Them.
The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.