You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have left, the only thing that isn’t bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.
When you don’t know where you’re going it always seems longer – you ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after it’s over in a flash.
He was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.
I feel like I’m in a world with its own sense of logic. Its own rules. Like when you’re in a dream, and you know there are rules you mustn’t break. Even if you don’t know what they mean. I’m just going along with it, you know?
And then they were at Tristran’s old home, where his sister waited for him, and there was a steaming breakfast on the stove and on the table, prepared for him, lovingly, by the woman he had always believed to be his mother.
He was standing on the pavement outside Nick Farthing’s house, his face damp from the thick night mist.
So you all remember: just because you’re small, doesn’t mean you got no power.
The marquis stared at Richard, openly amused. “What a refreshing mind you have, young man,” he said. “There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?
He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and smile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.
I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.
It was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name.
You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential.
I’m very clever,’ said the Doctor. It was a good line, and he was determined to use it as much as possible.
I was their first book.
Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?
The process of writing can be magical – there times when you step out of an upper-floor window and you just walk across thin air, and it’s absolute and utter happiness. Mostly, it’s a process of putting one word after another.
Have you ever got everything you ever wanted? And then realized it wasn’t what you wanted at all?
The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, on the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgement.
It’s a fine wake I’ll be wanting, with the best if everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days.
I serve the king of dreams and I do his bidding. But you are correct once I was a poet and like all poets I spent too long in the kingdom of dreams.