The best Book Quotes (Page 9)

Hey, we've all got problems, chum. I'm overly talkative. You look like a field of buttercups in a suit.

Minor magicians take pains to fit this traditional wizardly bill. By contrast, the really powerful magicians take pleasure in looking like accountants.

"Much has happened since last we met, Bartimaeus," he went on. "Do you remember how we parted?"
"No." I did.
"You set light to me, old friend. Struck a match and left me burning in a copse."
The crow shifted uneasily beneath the cleaver."That's a gesture of endearment in some cultures. Some hug, some kiss, some set each other on fire in small patches of woodland."

"Plan F, we follow Plan F, right now."
"Is that the one where we run away?"
"Not at all. It's the one where we beat a dignified emergency retreat."

Jabor finally appeared at the top of the stairs, sparks of flame radiating from his body and igniting the fabric of the house around him. He caught sight of the boy, reached out his hand and stepped forward.
And banged his head nicely on the low-slung attic door.

Burned and squashed to death in a silver vat of soup. There must be worse ways to go. But not many.

Nothing could keep me from you. Nothing in life or Death...

It was one of those moments when a great Don't Care wave hits you, and you float off on it, head back, looking at the sky.

At Lockwood & Co., George was famous for not being able to throw or catch with any accuracy. Back in the kitchen at Portland Row, even the casual passing out of fruit or bags of chips became an exercise fraught with danger.

It was higher and shriller than Holly's, so we knew that it was Kipps.

I had a chance at him now. Things were a bit more even. He knew my name, I knew his. He had six years' experience, I had five thousand and ten. That was the kind of odds that you could do something with.

This was classic Lockwood. Friendly, considerate, empathetic. My personal impulse would have been to slap the girl soundly around the face and boot her moaning backside out into the night. Which is why he's the leader, and I'm not. Also why I have no female friends.

What, are you queuing now? Just how British are you people? Don't just stand in line! Kill somebody!

Well, when you're being held at gunpoint by a geriatric madman in a metal skirt, you've kind of hit rock bottom anyway. It can't really get much worse.

Let's have the baddish one first,' George said. 'I prefer my misery to come at me in stages, so I can acclimatize on the way.

Watch where you leave your victims! I stubbed my toe on that.

"I wanted to wake you straightaway, but I knew I had to wait several hours to ensure you were safely recovered."
"What! How long has it been?"
"Five minutes. I got bored."

A warm feeling filled me. It was made of tea and biscuits and sudden gratitude.

George had his faraway look, the one that made him look like a constipated owl.

Who says I'm dying? Did you see the amount of sheer effort it took me to escape the land of the dead? I'm not going back in now!

Ignoring the whispers of the skull, which kept suggesting different, unlikely kitchen utensils that could be used for murder, I sketched out a map of the room.

Ah, two firm friends, reunited at last! There should be sweet violin music playing for us, but I'll settle for the screams of the dying.

Death is fugitive; even when you're watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your fingers. You don't get that sudden drop of the head you see in movies. Instead you simply sit there, waiting for something to happen, and all at once you realize you've missed it.

If she'd repeatedly fallen over while crossing soft ground, you could have sewn a crop of beans in the chin-holes she left behind.

It's a commonly known fact that while cats can't stand ghosts, spiders love them.

More ghosts have been created in bedrooms than anywhere else.

She was so radiant, it was like the other-light was already on her.

It's a curious thing with George. With his glasses off, his eyes looked small and weak - blinky and a bit baffled, like an unintelligent sheep that's taken a wrong turn. But when he put them on again, they went all sharp and steely, more like the eyes of an eagle that eats dumb sheep for breakfast.

Okay, maybe I'd been a little ratty, but there's something about rotting corpses leaping at my face that puts me a bit on edge.

"Is mindless violence your solution to everything?" The ghost considered. "Pretty much, yeah."

Because people who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were.

Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy.

A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, like bright rectilinear beetles.

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.

My old grandmother always used to say, Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever.

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends.

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers - we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals.

It is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them.

It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is often brought on by short people. They are so much more energetic and uncompromising than the big fellows.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial - I believe we are lost.

We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death.

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit.

The things men did or felt they had to do.

Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.