David Almond Quotes

The season of evil," I echoed. "Protect your soul.

Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and ... Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and ... And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling ... paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody.

Themes around education and learning run through my work.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.
Mina

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

Being young is like being mad. Maybe just being human, at any age, is a bit like being mad. But Maybe the best thing that we do, and the best thing that we are, come from madness.

The beauties of the North seemed to be intensified by the loss we had experienced there, and they drew us back to them.

I said, 'Do you know what shoulder blades are for?'
She giggled.
'Do you not even know that?' she said.
'Do you?'
'It's a proven fact, common knowledge. They're where your wings were, and where they'll grow again.

Maybe we were mad that day. Maybe some of the things that seemed to happen didn't really happen at all. Maybe many of the things that seemed to happen in the days and weeks that followed didn't really happen. Maybe it was all because we were young, and because being young is like being mad. Maybe just being human, at any age, is a bit like being mad.
But maybe the best things that we do, and the best things that we are, come from madness.

I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs.

Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.

I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems.

The dead are often known to eat 27 and 53

They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house. "What on earth will you be doing with something so large?" said Mum.
"I shall live in it with my servants, of course," said Mina. "Or I shall establish a school."
"A school, my lady?"
"Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.

I do think there is evil. But it is very rare. It is as rare as true goodness. And just as true goodness produces rare saints, true evil produces rare monsters. The rest of us are semi-good, semi-bad, and we live our lives in a kind of half-happy, half-sad daze. We might hope that one sunny morning we find ourselves in the presence of a saint. And we must pray that we do not encounter the monster.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

I love afternoons like that, like when we talk about things like metempsychosis, when we learn so much, and explore so much, and ideas grow and take flight, like the idea about the universe and the egg. I love being home-schooled, when we don't have to stick to subjects and timetables and rules.

Words are too easy," he says.
He opens his book. "What looks like truth and sounds like truth might be nothing but a dream, nothing but a story I wish had happened.

Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.

When you grow up", I said, "do you ever stop feeling little and weak?"
"No," she says. "There's always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown-up you are.

Anyway, in the end, I don't really believe in Heaven at all and i don't believe in perfect angles. I think that this might be the only Heaven there can possibly be, this world we live in now, but we haven't quite realized it yet.

If you can imagine doing something, then you can do it.

He narrows his eyes.
"Is this true?" He sighs. "It is, isn't it? That's all I need.

I was born in a hovel on the banks of the Tyne, as so many of us were back then.

Can love help a person to get better?' I asked.

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.

Stories are living things, creatures that move and grow in the imaginations of writer and reader. They must be solid and touchable just like the land, and must have fluid half-known depths just like the sea.

Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can't know. Why is your sister ill? Why did my father die? ... Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can't. we have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

It's called evolution. You must know that. Yes, we are.'
She looked up from her book.
'I would hope, though,' she went on, 'that we also have some rather more beautiful ancestors. Don't you?'
Mina

more 27 and 53,'i said. 'Food of the gods,' he said

I don't want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I'll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it's possible to be. I'm growing and I don't know how to grow. I'm living but I haven't started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it's like I'm not here in the world at all and I simply don't exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.

Death is hungry and Destruction is determined and it does not like its intended victims to get away.

We have each other, and our stories twist and mingle like the twisting currents of a river. We hold each other tight as we spin and lurch across our lives. There are moments of great joy and magic. The most astounding things can lie waiting as each day dawns, as each page turns.

I won't ask for enything mor complicated today as I don't wish to further disapoynt myself.

Mum has made a little model of Dad - it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do.

They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel," she said. "They say they're where your wings will grow again one day.

We scoffed at the kids who weren't like us, the ones who already talked about careers, or bliddy mortgages and pensions. Kids wanting to be old before they were young. Kids wanting to be dead before they'd lived. They were digging their own graves, building the walls of their own damn jails. Us, we hung to our youth. We were footloose, fancy free. We said we'd never grow boring and old. We plundered charity shops for vintage clothes. We bought battered Levis and gorgeous faded velvet stuff from Attica in High Bridge. We wore coloured boots, hemp scarves from Gaia. We read Baudelaire and Byron. We read our poems to each other. We wrote songs and posted them on YouTube. We formed bands. We talked of the amazing journeys we'd take together once school was done. Sometimes we paired off, made couples that lasted for a little while, but the group was us. We hung together. We could say anything to each other. We loved each other.

It was great to see the owls," I said.
She smiled.
"Yes. They're wild things, of course. Killers, savages. They're wonderful.

It needn't look like any particular thing at all. How could we imagine that we could make a world as perfect and as lovely as the world that God has made? All we can do is to do our best. Paint and draw. Create your own beautiful imperfect world.

It happened so long ago I can't even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

You must live in peace," he told us. "We are only in this world for a short period of vivid and wonderful waking in an eternity of dreamless dark.

We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.
We let the stars shine into us.

What are you?" I whispered.
He shrugged again.
"Something," he said. "Something like you, something like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel." He laughed. "Something like that.

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I think of him dreaming of being married to Kim and of tractors and harvesters and conferences in nice country hotels while my dreams are filled with war, with snakes, with bloody wounds, disaster and death. I keep feeling blood trickling over my skin.

I have hair that drifts like seaweed when I swim. I have eyes that shine like rock pools. My ears are like scallop shells. The ripples on my skin are like the ripples on the sand when the tide has turned back again. At night I gleam and glow like sea beneath the stars and moon. Thoughts dart and dance inside like little minnows in the shallows. They race and flash like mackerel farther out. My wonderings roll in the deep like sails. Dreams dive each night into the dark like dolphins do and break out happy and free into the morning light. These are the things I know about myself and that I see when I look in the rock pools at myself.

How can you turn yourself into something you want to be when you're alredy what you are?

Yes. But sad's alright. Sad's just apart of everything

Nobody. Mr nobody. Mr bones and mr had enough and mr arthur itis. Now get out and leave me alone.

Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

Sometimes children must be left alone to be still and silent, and to do.

In the end she just said ... All I did was to run away for a few minutes! All I wanted was to be free!

I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It's dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep in the room next door.

The letters make words and words make us.

I am Billy Dean. This is the truth. This is my tail.

You're my best boy. Whatever happens, you'll always be my best boy.

We are all wanderers and travellers, refugees and pilgrims until we return once more to the stars.

Death is knowing you're about to die,' says Mam. It's seeing the dead and seeing the living all at once. It's wanting not to die and not to live. It's wanting to stay with the last breath when the dead and the living are all around you, and touching you, and whispering, It's all right, Mam. Everything's all right. But there's no way of staying with the last breath. You have to die.

And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds.

Time's Flying," said Dad. He Smiled. He pointed to the air. "There it is, flying past! Catch it!" And he jumped, and caught Time in his hands, and showed it to Lizzie. She took it from him, and threw it up again.
"There it goes," she called. "Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Time!

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.

She points at my chest.
"And much more interestingly, what's that?"
"Blood," I say.
She gets her camera out.