Quotes from Lloyd Alexander

He will not succeed in this, Taran said. Somehow, we must find a way to escape. We dare not lose hope. I agree absolutely, Fflewddur answered. Your general idea is excellent; it's only the details that are lacking...

For man to be worthy of any rank, he must strive first to be a man.

That is why your sacrifice was all the more difficult. You chose to be a hero not through enchantment but through your own manhood.

Every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone.

If life is a loom, the pattern you weave is not so easily unraveled.

No, no, said Taran slowly, It would be folly to think of attacking them. He smiled quickly at Fflewddur. The bards would sing of us, he admitted, but we'd be in no position to appreciate it.

Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.

I can't stand people who say 'I told you so.' That's worse than somebody coming up and eating your dinner before you have a chance to sit down.

Children may not understand all that's happening below the surface of a story. It doesn't matter. Because even though they may not be able to define or verbalize it, they sense there's something more than meets the eye; on an almost subliminal level, they're aware of a richness of texture, or meaning and emotion -- a richness that, in a great book, is inexhaustible. And the child may well come back to it again and again, perhaps long after he's stopped being a child.

I have never known courage to be judged by the length of a man's hair. Or, for the matter of that, whether he has any hair at all.

What you may seek and what you may find are not always one.

Stale water is a poor drink,' said Annlaw. 'Stale skill is worse. And the man who walks in his own footsteps only ends where he began.

You have a point, said Fronto, and even a poet must occasionally bow to logic.

She has given you something of value: the truth in her heart.

The muse in charge of fantasy wears good, sensible shoes.

Hope is an essential thread in the fabric of all fantasies, an Ariadne's thread to guide us out of the labyrinth ... Human beings have always needed hope, and surely now more than ever.

King Constantine IX of Regia had been killed three times and was bored with it. He wanted a bath.

What! I don't care about being a princess! And since I'm already a young lady, how else could I behave? That's like asking a fish not to swim! ~Princess Eilonwy, daughter of Angharad, daughter of Regat, of the Royal house of Llyr

It is harsh enough for each man to bear his own wound. But he who leads bears the wounds of all who follow him.

In an age that seems to be increasingly dehumanized, when people can be transformed into non-persons, and where a great deal of our adult art seems to diminish our lives rather than add to them, children's literature insists on the values of humanity and humaneness.

Count the deed, not the thought.

And thus did an Assistant Pig-Keeper become High King of Prydain.

The dear girl, I fear, may be contemplating some alarming, disruptive perhaps dangerous project. In which case, I would naturally do all in my power to keep her from any such rash or foolhardy enterprise – unless she wished me to accompany her.

I've heard men complain of doing woman's work, and women complain of doing man's work," she added, fastening her bony thumb and forefinger on Gurgi's ear and marching him to a stool beside Taran, "but I've never heard the work complain of who did it, so long as it got done!