Amanda Craig Quotes

Polly was all too aware that much of her time on holiday would be spent doing the laundry and the cooking and the child-care and all the other chores that back in London would be shared with her cleaning lady. A holiday with Theo and the children represented two weeks of domestic and maternal drudgery.

It's not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it's any comfort, the dark wood isn't just that. It's also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn.

Family is all politics. Everyone hates each other's guts, if they're honest… Most brothers and sisters try to top each other, given the chance; you always get the worst wars in countries with big families….People have kids because they go soft in the head, tarts especially. They forget what it's like to be a kid themselves and want to remember through their own. They don't want us, not real brand-new people who puke and criticise and tell them to bog off: they want their own frigging innocence back. They want to have their own lives back again, with the bad bits taken out. Quite frankly, they'd be better off with a dog.

It's all biology. If it weren't for two thousand years of the Christian tradition we wouldn't think of pretending otherwise…Romance is the true opiate of the masses.

To thoughtful natures, events are like depth charges: the surface is calm, but the shock spreads further.

What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It's what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you've lost the plot. Or just lost it.

People who love reading are often called bookworms - but that's the wrong way around. It's not you that worms into a book; it's books that worm into you." - Amanda Craig

If you read fairy tales carefully, you'll notice they are mostly about people who aren't heroes. They don't have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten up, robbed, starved. But they find they are stronger than their misfortunes.

I'll tell you the difference between our countries. Americans think life is serious but not hopeless; the English that life is hopeless but not serious.

Each morning the light came through the slats of the shutters in ripples, and as it washed towards the inhabitants of the Casa Luna it smoothed away memories of the past, It was for this that they had endured long hours in the grey English winter or freezing American climes, for this that they had worked and planned and worked extra hours/ The horrible feelings of stress, tension, anger and frustration that coursed through their veins every day almost unnoticed began to fade.

Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom

There was a certain usefulness in having a husband whom most people could barely tolerate: it deflected envy, for one thing.

Not every child takes instantly to books like a duck to water, but I don't believe there are children who hate books. There are just children who haven't yet found the right books for them.

All paradises are there to be expelled from.

The idea that any of their offspring could possibly be accused of involvement in criminal activities caused deep offence, even to parents who believed that property was theft.

A hundred years ago, people had perfectly understood that you could die of a broken heart, now they thought you were making a fuss about nothing…Certain kinds of suffering are like radiation: they cause furious growth and mutation of the inner self.

I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, "Put a jumper on

All age is a kind of tiredness, I think. When you're young, the lines never show. Every morning you wake unmarked, wiped clear by sleep. One day, though, you see lines that itch, as though some crumb of existence has been creased into your skin. They can never be smoothed away, and after a while you forget that this heavy, irritable feeling wasn't always there.

Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten..

You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? 'Never complain, never explain.

As ever, Morpurgo's warmth and humanity suffuse a story of courage, love and hope.

Very happy or unhappy, people disappear.

That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is.

It's the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.

The sudden acquisition of power does not go to the head, but to the groin. In some, it promotes lust; in others, supplants it. Those on whom its effect is purely cerebral may indeed be counted as fortunate.