Diana Wynne Jones Quotes

If you knew the trouble we've had because Howl will keep falling in love like this! We've had lawsuits, and suitors with swords, and mothers with rolling pins, and fathers and uncles with cudgels. And aunts. Aunts are terrible. They go for you with hat pins.

But I discovered that people like me
they do, you know, if you like them
and then it was all right.

If you're thinking of calling on that Mrs. Pentstemmon, you can save yourself the trouble. The old biddy's dead."
"Dead?" said Sophie. She had a silly impulse to add, But she was alive an hour ago! And she stopped herself, because death is like that: people are alive until they die.

Some people are thoroughly self-centred. This thing goes with me. I need it for moral support.

She was remorseless, but she lacked method.

And you're too nice," he added, above the lap-lap of the water and the patter of sand on the water-lily leaves. "I was relying on you being too jealous to let that demon near the place.

You've probably all had those kinds of dreams that are like usual life, except that a lot of things are not the same, and you seem to know the future in them. Well, this is because these other worlds where two things can happen spread out from our world like rainbows, and sort of flow into one another-

People Sophie had known all her life came and bought flowers by the bundle. None of them recognized her, and that made her feel very odd.

Actually, in the wild, we'd be the only person that we wouldn't recognize, if you think about it.

Howl,heart is a heavy burden.

Tell me about this Wizard Howl of yours."
"He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly, and you can't pin him down to anything."
"Indeed? Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies."
"What do you mean, vices? I was just describing Howl. He comes from another world entirely, you know, called Wales, and I refuse to believe he's dead!

Obviously, we have to start with some basic definition of the hero and the heroic ideal. [...] I was saddened to find that, as an eldest child and a girl, I was barred fro heroism entirely--or was I? [In Scheharazade's The Arabian Nights] The log of wood was a girl, and she most heroically set things to right. Good. It was possible for a girl to be a hero then.

If the spell was off, I'd have my heart eaten before I could turn around."
"Don't you want your heart eaten?" asked the fire. [ ... ]
"Naturally I don't," Sophie answered.

Nobody can buy a hat without gossiping.

All these things that crib and cab in your brain, in your imagination, are in fact things that might well in later life drive you insane.

Of course you hate getting angry!" she retorted. "You don't like anything unpleasant, do you? You're a slitherer-outer, that's what you are! You slither away from anything you don't like!

After that, all the while Millie was eating the pudding ... we both tore Christopher's character to shreds. It was wonderful fun ... He drove everyone mad in Chrestomanci Castle by insisting on silk shirts and exactly the right kind of pajamas. 'And he could get them right anyway by magic,' Millie told me, 'if he wasn't too lazy to learn how ... But the thing that really annoys me is the way he never bothers to learn a person's name. If a person isn't important to him, he always forgets their name.'
When Millie said this, I realized that Christopher had never once forgotten my name ...

Things are going round and round in my head
or maybe my head is going round and round in things.

Howl pointed a shaky hand up toward the canopy of his bed. "That's why I love spiders. 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try, again.' I keep trying," he said with great sadness. "But I brought it on myself by making a bargain some years ago, and I know I shall never be able to love anyone properly now."
The water running out of Howl's eyes was definitely tears now.

I could cut a star out of paper and drop it.

It's just as I thought," she said. "I prefer you to every single one of these. Some of these look far too proud of themselves, and some look selfish and cruel. You are unassuming and kind. I intend to ask my father to marry me to you, instead of to the Prince in Ochinstan. Would you mind?

My mother brought me up to be respectable," she said. "She never let me near the scullery, or the kitchen either."
"I don't believe this!" Peter said. "Why is it respectable not to know how to do things? Is it respectable to light a fire with a bar of soap?

Chrestomanci smiled and swept out of the room like a very long procession of one person.

Controller Borasus sighed with relief. Libraries were not places of danger. It had to be a hoax.

I only want to catch you," Michael explained. "I won't hurt you."
"No! No!" the star crackled desperately. "That's wrong! I'm supposed to die!"
"But I could save you if you'd let me catch you," Michael told it gently.
"No!" cried the star. "I'd rather die!

I don't think I will get married," Polly said as she stood up. "I'm going to train to be a hero instead.

Meanwhile a certain amount of moaning and groaning was coming from upstairs. Sophie kept muttering to the dog and ignored it. A loud, hollow coughing followed, dying away into more moaning. Crashing sneezes followed the coughing, each one rattling the window and all the doors. Sophie found those harder to ignore, but she managed. Poot-pooooot! went a blown nose, like a bassoon in a tunnel. The coughing started again, mingled with moans. Sneezes mixed with the moans and the coughs, and the sounds rose to a crescendo in which Howl seemed to be managing to cough, groan, blow his nose, sneeze, and wail gently all at the same time. The doors rattled, the beams in the ceiling shook, and one of Calcifer's logs rolled off onto the hearth.
"All right, all right, I get the message!" Sophie said, dumping the log back into the grate. "It'll be green slime next".

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

That can go in the cabinet, and so can this One Ring. No, don't put it on, you fool! It's dangerous!

On Wednesday, for variety, he accosted Andrew as Andrew went out to check the state of the garden walls and presented a further cardboard box containing ten kilos of tomatoes and a squash like a deformed head of a baby.

People are wrong when they say things like, "I didn't have time to think." If you're really worried, or really miserable, those feelings come welling up around the edges of the other things you're doing, so that you are in the feelings even when you're working hard at something else.

He gave Sophie the smile which had no doubt charmed the Witch of the Waste and possibly Lettie too, firing it along the fork, across the cream, straight into Sophie's eyes, dazzlingly. "If you can bully Calcifer, the King should give you no trouble at all."
Sophie stared through the dazzle and said nothing. This, she thought, was where she slithered out. She was leaving. It was too bad about Calcifer's contract. She had had enough of Howl. First green slime, then glaring at her for something Calcifer had done quite freely, and now this! Tomorrow she would slip off to Upper Folding and tell Lettie all about it.

"Eight Days of Luke" was refused by another confused publisher on the grounds that children shouldn't strike matches. When my agent pointed out that David in the book was twelve years old, the publisher said that he was striking matches to summon the devil, then, and this couldn't be allowed.

The pityingly look made Sophie utterly ashamed. He was such a dashing specimen too, with a bony, sophisticated face
really quite oold, well into his twenties
and elaborate blond hair. His sleeves trailed longer than any in the Square, all scalloped edges and silver insets. "Oh, no thank you, if you please, sir," Sophie stammered. "I
I'm only on my way to see my sister." "Then by all means do so," laughed this advanced young man. "Who am i to keep a pretty lady from her sister? Would you like me to go with you, since you seemed so cared?" He meant it kindly, which made Sophie, more ashamed than ever. "No. No thank you, sir!" she gasped and fled away past him. He wore perfume too.

You go and find who you really are, and don't let anyone stop you.

What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan.

I am really very grateful for this Award. It is one of the first given to a woman, and to two women at that. When I first started getting work published, I used to have wistful thoughts at the way all important awards were given to men. Women, I used to think, could be as innovative, imaginative and productive as possible - and women were the ones mostly at work in the field of fantasy for children and young adults - but only let a man enter the field, and people instantly regarded what he had to say and what he did as more Important. He got respectful reviews as well as awards, even if what he was doing - which it often was - was imitating the women. But you have changed all that.
Thank you for being so enlightened.
Women, large-minded, formidable women, have played an almost exclusive part in helping my career. I have hardly ever dealt with a man - at least, when it came to publishing:

I feel ill," he announced. "I'm going to bed, where I may die." He tottered piteously to the stairs. "Bury me beside Mrs. Pentstemmon," he croaked as he went up then to bed.

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.

How can I preach Dissolution?" he said. "How can I not believe in the gods when I have seen them for myself?"
"That's a question you certainly should be asking," Chrestomanci croaked. "Go down to Theare and ask it." Thasper nodded and turned to go. Chrestomanci leaned towards him and said from behind his handkerchief, "Ask yourself this too: Can the gods catch flu? I think I may have given it to all of them. Find out and let me know, there's a good chap.

I mean one of the things about being alone is that you've no people to define yourself off, I mean, people are like all-round mirrors, because let's face it, we don't often see ourselves all round in a mirror anyway, do we.

If you must know, I-I had never in my life kissed a young lady, and you are far too beautiful to me to want to get it wrong!

Charles realized that if he were going to apologize to Chrestomanci, he had better do it at once. He turned around to say it. But the folds had already rippled flat and nothing was the same anymore ...

Yes. I was looking for Lettie. They were both very kind to me," Percival said, "Even though they'd never seen me before. And Wizard Howl kept visiting to court Lettie. Lettie didn't want him, and she asked me to bite him to get rid of him, until Howl suddenly began asking her about you and - "
"what?"
he said, " I know someone called sophie who looks a little like you.. And Lettie said, that's my sister,' without thinking," Percival said. " And she got terribly worried then, particularly as Howl went on asking about her sister.

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.

When might I expect you then?"
Whenever is least convenient for you, the demon replied.

Being a hero means ignoring how silly you feel.

This wood," Yam told him, "is like human memory. It does not need to take events in their correct order. Do you wish to go to an earlier time and start from there?"
"Would I understand more if I did?" Hume asked.
"You might," said Yam. "Both of us might."
"Then it's worth a try," Hume agreed.
They went together down the left-hand fork.

The soldier was like that. He was an expert in getting other people to do what he wanted. The only creature that could make the soldier do something he did not want was Midnight, and Midnight did things she did not want only when Whippersnapper wanted something. That put the kitten right at the top of the pecking order. A kitten!

Tell me of this wizard Howl of yours."
Sophie's teeth chattered, but she said proudly, "He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly, and you can't pin him down to do anything."
"Indded?" asked Abdullah. "Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies."
"What do you mean, vices?" Sophie asked angrily. "I was just describing Howl!

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

All she heard next of the strange conversation behind the sofa was Mrs. Pendragon saying something about sending Twinkle (or was his name Howl?) to bed without supper and Twinkle daring her to 'jutht TRY it.

Somewhere in the lane after that they came level with a small door next to a fried chicken shop. There was a small red-lit sign over this door.

A library is a place full of mouth-watering food for thought.

Polly finished her huge narrative during the summer term. The day after she had finished it, she went round with the oddest mixture of feelings, pride at having got it done, sick of the sight of it and glad it was over, and completely lost without it.

As often happened, Charmain began to despair of getting her mother to understand. She's not stupid, she just never lets her mind out, she thought.

Christopher discovered that you dealt with obnoxious masters and most older boys the way you dealt with governesses: you quite politely told them the truth in the way they wanted to hear it, so that they thought they had won and left you in peace.

This is ridiculous, I mean, wholly ridiculous. It never did any child any harm to have something that was a tiny bit above them anyway, and I claim that anyone who can follow Doctor Who can follow absolutely anything.

Howl's voice was presently heard shouting weakly, Help me, someone! I'm dying from neglect up here!

Don't interrupt,' one of the boys said. 'He'll lose his life.'
Seeing it was a matter of life and death, Sophie and Michael backed toward the door. But Howl, quite unperturbed at killing his nephew, strode over to the wall and pulled the boxes up by the roots.

Doors are very powerful things. Things are different on either side of them.

And it's a pity too that I've no right to open your letters. I hope you don't get many, or my conscience will give me no peace.

I've got a hangover."
"No, you hit your head on the floor."
"I can't stay. I've got to rescue that fool Sophie.

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When you grow up to be an author and write books, you'll think you're making the books up, but they'll all really be true, somewhere.

Evidently this was the kind of man
that Estelle fell instantly in love with.

Sophie knew Howl could sound unhappy in heaven if it suited him.

I think it was then that it dawned on me that Mum wasn't going to notice Chris was missing. She has been made so that she thinks Chris is just round the corner all the time. She doesn't realise that she never sees him. I don't know why I didn't understand earlier. If Aunt Maria can turn Chris into a wolf, she's surely strong enough to do this to Mum- except that it seems a different kind of thing, much more natural and ordinary, and I didn't really think she could do both kinds.

I do feel very strongly that this is one of the things which people need encouragement to sort out, because I have this very strong feeling that everybody is probably a genius at something, it's just a question of finding this.

To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much.

The demon at length fell to singing a gentle, flickering little song. It was not in any language Sophie knew - or she thought not, until she distinctly heard the word "saucepan" in it several times ...

And, suddenly, as if her head cleared, she was quite sure that wonderful things did indeed exist. Even if they're only in my own mind, she thought, they're there and worth fighting for.

It does not seem to me that I have the right to foist a story on people, most of whom are children who should be learning all the time, unless I am learning from it too.

Be daffodils in June, you beastly things!

Everybody at a university was to her a professor, unless they were students of course, and therefore even worse.

I've often noticed" Fiona said, "that when people say, 'This can't happen in this day and age', they say it because it is happening.

Look at this!" he shouted "look at it! what has that one-woman force of chaos done to these spells?"
Sophie and Michael whirled round and looked at Howl. His hair was wet, but, apart from that, neither of them could see that it looked any different.
"If you mean me-" Sophie began.
"I do mean you! Look!" Howl shrieked. He sat down with a thump on the three-legged stool and jabbed at his wet head with his fingers. "Look. Survey. Inspect. My hair is ruined! I look like a pan of bacon and eggs!"
Michael and Sophie bent nervously over Howl's head. it seemed the usual flaxen color right down to the roots. The only difference might have been a slight, very slight, trace of red. Sophie found that agreeable. It reminded her a little of the color her own hair should have been.
"I think it's nice," she said.
"Nice!" screamed Howl. "You would! You did it on purpose. You couldn't rest until you made me miserable too. Look at it! It's ginger! I shall have to hide until it's grown out!" He spread his arms out passionately. "Dispair!" he yelled. "Anguish! Horror!

A garden should be natural-seeming, with wild sections, including a large area of bluebells.

Sophie did not care to think how Howl might react if Fanny woke him by stabbing him with her parasol.

You are nosy," said Howl. "You're a dreadfully nosy, horribly bossy, appallingly clean old woman. Control yourself. You're victimizing us all." "But

There goes Mig with her happy endings again," Chris said. But I don't care. I like happy endings. And I asked Chris why something should be truer just because it's unhappy. He couldn't answer.

He picked up the skull and knocked an onion ring out of its eye socket.
"I see Sophie has been busy again. Couldn't you have restrained her, my friend?" The skull yattered its teeth at him. Howl put it down rather hastily.

I think we ought to live happily ever after.

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 seem to have excalibured this knife.

It was time for a strong-minded woman to take charge. Abdullah was quite glad that Sophie was one.

Funny the way it was never enough to swear and promise just the once. You seemed to have to rethink and repromise every time the subject came up.

Goats," said Maxwell Hyde, "are a special case. Mad as hatters, all of them.

Typical! I break my neck trying to get here, and I find you peacefully tidying up!

And suddenly, as if her head had cleared, she was quite sure that wonderful things did indeed exist. Even if they're only in my own mind, she thought, they're there and worth fighting for. I mustn't give in.

Mainly as sort of blueprints for dealing with most of the adults in their lives, to some extent with their fellows. It is this notion of aiming high and there's always hope, aim low and you might as well stop now.

You've no right to walk into people's castles and take their guitars.

Learn to drive?"
"Never," said Quentin. "My mission in life is to be a passenger.

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Before long, everyone was giving him answers, and feeling a little superior, because it was really remarkable the number of things Chrestomanci seemed not to know. He had heard of Hitler, though he asked Brian to refresh his memory about him, but he had only the haziest notion about Gandhi or Einstein, and he had never heard of Walt Disney or reggae.

I'm delirious," said Howl. "Spots are crawling before my eyes."
"Those are spiders," said Sophie. "Why can't you cure yourself with a spell?"
"Because there is no cure for a cold," Howl said dolefully.

I think one of things is that all fantasy it seems to me works the way your brain basically works. This is perhaps a startling concept, but I think it's true.

Sophie got herself to the mirror, and found that she had to hobble. The face in the mirror was quite calm, because it was what she expected to see. It was the face of a gaunt old woman, withered and brownish, surrounded by wispy white hair. Her own eyes, yellow and watery, stared out at her, looking rather tragic.
"Don't worry, old thing," Sophie said to the face. "You look quite healthy. Besides, this is much more like you really are.

NUNNERIES: The Rule is that any Nunnery you approach, particularly if you are in dire need of rest, Healing, or provisions, will prove to have been recently sacked. You will find the place a smoking ruin littered with corpses. You will be shocked and wonder who could have done such a thing. Your natural curiosity will shorty be satisfied, because there is a further Rule that there will be one survivor, either a very young NOVICE or a very old nun, who will give you a graphic account of the raping and burning and the names of the perpetrators. If old, she will then die, thus saving you from having to take her along and feed her from your dwindling provisions; if a Novice, she will either die likewise or prove to be not as nunnish as you at first thought, in which case you may be glad to have her along.

Howl backed into the door to shut it and leaned there in a tragic attitude. "Look at you all!" he said. "Ruin stares me in the face. I slave all day for you. And not one of you, even Calcifer, can spare time to say hello!"
Calcifer said, "I never do say hello."
"Is something wrong?" asked Sophie.
"That's better," Howl said. "Some of you are pretending to notice me at last. Yes, something is wrong.

You've rotted your mind with reading books.

Doras II was a somewhat absentminded king, It is said, when Death came to summon him, Doras granted Death the usual formal audience and then dismissed him from his presence. Death was too embarrassed to return until many years later- Ka'a Orto'o, Gnomic Utterances