Quotes from Diana Wynne Jones

Calcifer agreed to speed up the castle because of a scarecrow? Dear Sophie, do please tell me how you bully a fire demon into being that obliging. I'd dearly love to know!

Zip! Back to the mansion. Zip! to Market Square. Zip! and there was the castle yet again. She was getting the hang of it. Zip! Here was Upper Folding—but how did you stop? Zip! "Oh, confound it!" Sophie cried, almost in Marsh Folding again.

But her eyes were blue and full of anxieties, and her hair was darkish.

Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories.

If you stood up and told the truth in the wrong way, it was not true any longer, though it might be as powerful as ever.

Howl said, "I think we ought to live happily ever after," and she thought he meant it.

You people keep spoiling my plans. First Wizard Suliman would not come near the Waste, so that I had to threaten Princess Valeria in order to make the King order him out here. Then, when he came, he grew trees.

How does she keep it up? How can Miss Hodge be a teacher and not use witchcraft at all? I use it all the time. How else can I have eyes in the back of my head?' 'One of the great mysteries of our time,' Chrestomanci agreed.

She read a great deal, and very soon realised how little chance she had of an interesting future.

Why am I holding a dog full of angels?

My shining dishonesty will be my salvation

Lettie, as the second daughter, was never likely to come to much

All power corrupts, but we need electricity.

As a girl, Sophie would have shriveled with embarrassment at the way she was behaving. As an old woman, she did not mind what she did or said. She found that a great relief.

This carpet," said Abdullah, "unlike you, is of an ensorcellment so pure and excellent that it will listen only to the finest of language. It is at heart a poet among carpets." A certain smugness spread through the pile of the carpet. It held its tattered edges proudly straight and sailed sweetly forward into the golden sunlight above the mist.

Barbarian Horde This will be lot and lots of wild-screaming people advancing under a cloud of dust in order to devestate more civilized parts. They are a bit like locusts, except that they kill people direcly.

I was born to strange sights. Things invisible to see . . . I know where all past years are, and who cleft the Devil's foot.

That's magic I admire, using something that exists anyway and turning it round into a curse.

She read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance she had of an interesting future.

You do not seem to me to be a beast. This makes me quite sure that you can't really be a man.

It was closely printed in long paragraphs that mostly seemed to begin, "If we extrapolate from our findings in my earlier work, we find ourselves ready to approach an extension of the paratypical phenomenology…" No, Charmain thought. I don't think we are ready.

Perhaps she was a little mad, but then old women often were.

I put my arms round her. For just a mere, single instant I had a real, heavy body in my arms and a moist face against my cheek, with a real, difficult personality to go with them.

The more I see of witchcraft, the more it seems just an easy way to be nasty.