It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.
Of all the organs, ′ said Nehemiah Trot, ’the tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste our sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue. Go to her! Talk to her!
I am an academic,” said Professor Mandalay, “and thus have no finely developed senses that would be comprehensible to anyone who has not ever needed to grade papers without actually reading the blessed things.
He died alone,′ said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. ‘It don’t matter a rat’s ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone.
It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.
We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.
Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you’ll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.
Fat Charlie wondered what Rosie’s mother would usually hear in a church. Probably just cries of “Back! Foul best of Hell!” followed by gasps of “Is it alive?” and a nervous inquiry as to whether anybody had remembered to bring the stakes and hammers.
Can’t say I’ve ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending.
Sometimes you do things you regret, but there’s nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on.
But then it occured to him that any progress he had made on his quest so far he had made by accepting the help that had been offered to him.
Someone had once told her that if you look up at the sky from the bottom of a mine shaft, even in the brightest daylight, you see the night sky and stars.
I am Desire, am I not? That is what I am; that is what I do. I make things want things. Where I touch, things want and need and love – drawn to their objects of desire like butterflies to a candle-flame.
I’m an explorer,” said Coraline.
That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realising that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you’re rubbing against worm food. No offense meant.
It was the size of an ox, of a bull elephant, of a lifetime. It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heartbeats.
You’ve got to admit it’s a bit of a pantomime, though,” said Crawly. “I mean, pointing out the Tree and saying ‘Don’t Touch’ in big letters. Not very subtle, is it? I mean, why not put it on top of a high mountain or a long way off? Makes you wonder what He’s really planning.
Are there any ponies in this?” asked my sister. “I thought there would be ponies by now.
Once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed and breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, ‘Be whole,’ and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.
If you’re making mistakes it means you’re out there doing something.