I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we’ve got, which is “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” I told those stories many, many times.
There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.
The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.
Teachers often make the mistake of thinking they’re the boss of the class; they’re not. The boss of the class is sitting down there somewhere.
Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.
Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don’t try and shut it out.
The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.
A murderer was a worthy companion.
The fact was that where Will is concerned, she was developing a new kind of sense, as if he were simply more in focus than anyone she’d known before. Everything about him was clear and close and immediate.
The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.
From what we are, spirit; from what we do, matter. Matter and spirit are one.
Sticks and stones, I’ll break yer bones, but names ain’t worth a quarrel.
Well, I have an idea, usually a visual image of some sort. A setting. A particular, I don’t know, urban scene, a particular time of day. Something that grips my imagination for some reason.
Tell him, we are not devils but we have friends who are.
We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.
You don’t read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn’t work like that. What’s happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.
For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that’s a high title to claim.
The justice of it seems to children correct and right – I mean, we laugh at it! We underestimate children’s ability to know what is a story and what isn’t.
All good things pass away.
What is worth having is worth working for.