Eva Ibbotson Quotes

Happiness is almost as good as magic for altering a person's looks.

Would you like me to stop talking? Because I can. I have to concentrate, but it's possible

Please, God,' Ruth would pray, 'don't let me be competitive. Let me realize what a privilege it is to study. Let me remember that knowledge must be pursued for its own sake and please, please stop me wanting to beat Verena Plackett in the exams.'
She prayed hard and she meant what she said. But God was busy that autumn as the International Brigade came back, defeated, from Spain, Hitler's bestialities increased, and sparrows everywhere continued to fall.

It was too much ... the gods would not permit such joy.

I want to live like music sounds."- Ruth

Herr Altenburg, I can't; I have vertigo.' And Marek looked at him: 'All right - I'll get the chemist to fix me something.

We mustn't only remember the good bits," she said. "We must remember the bad bits, too, so that we know it was real.

Duty exists and it's real. It means sharing any gift or talent that you have with people who need it. It means not being afraid or selfish or tight - but open.

I must go
the aunts will be worried. Guy, I don't know if we will meet again, but
" Her voice broke and she tried again. "Sometimes, when you're alone and you look up at
" Once more, she had to stop. Then she managed, "If I cannot be anything else ... could I be your Star Sister? Could I at least be that?"
Guy dug his nails into his palms. Everything in him rose in protest at the fey, romantic conceit. He did not want her in the heavens, linked to him by some celestial whimsy, but here and now in the flesh and after the death of the flesh, her hand in his as they rose from graves like these when the last trump sounded.
"Yes," he managed to say. "You can be my Star Sister. You can at least be that.

Dostoyevsky was her brother, Victorian children's books her passion and though she lived, when in funds, mainly on avocado pears, she took her bath each night with a different cookery book.

One must not judge other cultures by the standars of one's one,' said Aunt Hilda

But of course he knew, all of them knew. There is only one kind of a person a wizard can marry, and that is a witch.

We've been together for thirty-five years," Alec had said. "We've no call to change now.

Adventures, once they were over, were things that had to stay inside one
that no one else could quite understand.

I'm sorry you never got my note that night," said Minty. "I was arranging for us to go and live with them. You'll like that, won't you?" she asked Maia.
Maia was silent, looking down at her plate.
"Of course she will," jeered Finn. "Sergei will be able to kneel at her feet like a person in a book.

Miss Minton knew she was going to be dismissed, and she thought this was perfectly fair. A governess who let her charge sail up the rivers of the Amazon and live with Indian tribes could hardly expect to keep her job.

She's like snow in Russian," said Anna. "Snow in the evening when the sun sets and it looks like Alpengluhen, you know? And if snow had a scent it would smell like that [the rose] ...

People make their own worlds.

Ms. Wrack's mother, Mrs. Wrack, had been a mermaid: a proper one who lived on a rock and combed her hair and sang. But sailors had never been lured to their doom by her, partly because she looked like the back of a bus and partly because modern ships are so high out of the water that they never even saw her

One of the sisters started shaving her legs and marrying tax inspectors, so she was no good.

It was a heavenly summer, the summer in which France fell and the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. Leaves were never such an intense and iridescent green; sunlight glinted on flower-studded meadows as the Germans encircled the Maginot Line and overran not only France but Belgium and Holland. Birdsong filled the air in the lull between bursts of gunfire and accompanied the fleeing refugees who blocked the roads. It was as though the weather was preparing a glorious requiem for the death of Europe.

That settles it," said Mr. Trapwood. "We're going back to the pension. We're going to pack. We're going to be on the Bishop first thing tomorrow. Sir Aubrey will have to send someone else out. Nothing is worth another day in this hellhole."
Mr. Low did not answer. He had caught a fever and was lying in the bottom of a large canoe owned by the Brothers of the São Gabriel Mission, who had arranged for the crows to be taken back to Manaus. His eyes were closed and he was wandering a little in his mind, mumbling about a boy with hair the color of the belly of the golden toad which squatted on the lily leaves of the Mamari River.
There had, of course, been no golden-haired boys; there hadn't been any boys at all. What there had been was a leper colony, run by the Brothers of Saint Patrick, a group of Irish missionaries to whom the crows had been sent.
"They're good men, the Brothers," a man on the docks had told them as they set off on their last search for Taverner's son. "They take in all sorts of strays--orphans, boys with no homes. If anyone knows where Taverner's lad might be, it'll be them."
Then he had spat cheerfully into the river because he was a crony of the chief of police and liked the idea of Mr. Low and Mr. Trapwood spending time with the Brothers, who were very holy men indeed and slept on the hard ground, and ate porridge made from manioc roots, and got up four times in the night to pray.
The Brothers' mission was on a swampy part of the r

As he clambered back and picked up the paddle, he was still muttering furiously in his own language and glaring at her. Without deciphering a single word, she knew he was scolding her for her carelessness, trying to explain that one had to be alert the whole time in the jungle.
"Idiota!" he said finally, and though Senhor and Senhora Olvidares in the phrase book had not used the word, Maia understood it well enough.

As Maia turned to go, hardly believing that there could be such happiness, she heard a loud splash. Miss Minton was leaning over the side, watching the parcel she had held on her knees floating away downriver.
"What was that?" asked Maia.
Miss Minton straightened herself.
If you must know," she said, "it was my corset.

When we're grown up I'll come back for you, I promise. No one can stop us then.

She stood looking carefully at the labeled portraits Ursala had put up: Little Crow, Chief of the Santees, Geronimo, last of the Apaches, and Ursala's favorite, Big Foot, dying in the snow at Wounded Knee.
"Isn't that where the massacre was?" asked Ellen.
"Yes. I'm going to go there when I'm grown up. To Wounded Knee."
"That seems sensible," said Ellen.

To this waltz, born in a distant, snowbound country out of longing for just such a flower-scented summer night as this, Rupert and Anna dance. They were under no illusions. The glittering chandeliers, the gold mirrors with their draped acanthus leaves, the plangent violins might be the stuff of romance, but this was no romance. It was a moment in a lifeboat before it sank beneath the waves; a walk across the sunlit courtyard towards the firing squad. This waltz was all they had.

I think I ought to cut my hair off," said Maia, one morning, as she tore yet another tooth out of Finn's comb.
"No. That's a bad idea."
Maia looked up, surprised. "But you wanted Clovis to cut his hair."
"That was different.

Those who think of the Amazon as a Green Hell," she read in an old book with a tattered spine, "bring only their own fears and prejudices to this amazing land. For whether a place is a hell or a heaven rests in yourself, and those who go with courage and an open mind may find themselves in Paradise.

How dare you suppose that I don't know who you are or what you are? That I don't understand what I see? Do you take me for some kind of besotted schoolboy? It is unspeakable! You could weigh as much as a hippopotamus and shave your head and wear a wig and it wouldn't make a difference to me. I never said you were beautiful. I never thought it. I said that you were you.

When you're sad, my Little Star, go out of doors. It's always better underneath the open sky.

Then she washed and dressed very attentively, putting on high-heeled court shoes, silk stockings, a black skirt and crisply ironed white blouse, because she was Viennese and one dressed properly even when one's world had ended.

And so they played some of the world's loveliest piano music - the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that.

There are those who dance the notes, and those who dance the music.

He then kissed her.
It was a very long time before he let her go. When he did, she looked up at him, hurt and bewilderment on her face.
"Why did you stop?" asked Tessa.
"I thought you might want to breathe," said Guy carefully.
"Breathe?" said Tessa, shocked. "I don't need to breathe when I'm with you.

And lying there, her hair in damp strands across her crumpled face, Harriet gave up the long, long struggle to love her father and her aunt.
It was for this loss above all that she wept. She had learned, during the long years of her childhood, to live without receiving love. To live without giving it seemed more than she could bear.

When you know what you want you usually get it.

In another couple of hours we can go on board."
He looked longingly at the lighted ship, ready for her start at dawn. She looked so clean, so nice, so British…
Mr. Low came to stand beside him. "Decent bunks, decent food, people speaking English. You can't believe it."
But in spite of the relief of being on the way home, the crows were broken men. Mr. Low was still feverish, Mr. Trapwood's insect bites had spread in an infected mass over his face and neck, and neither of them could keep down their food.

Maia had been sitting absolutely still on a chair in the hall, waiting.
Now she heard a loud peal on the street bell and turned to see a dark, wild-haired boy running up the steps. Taking no notice of the flustered maid, he came up to Maia.
"I'm going home, Maia," shouted Finn. "I'm going home!"
Upstairs a door had opened, and Miss Minton came slowly down the stairs, dabbing her eyes.
Then she drew herself up to her full height.
"We are all going home," she said.

If this is the 'Green Hell' of the Amazon, then hell is where I belong," said Maia.

It is for England that one marries,' she said. 'For the land.

The dowager rose and slipped from her pew. There was the sound of tearing silk as she threw up her arms to embrace her son. Then:
"Oh, Rupert, darling," she exclaimed in tones of theatrical despair, "don't you see? The game's up!

He was just drifting off to sleep when it occurred to him that perhaps the dog was not so ordinary after all. Perhaps he was someone the ogre had changed, and Ivo was going to spend the night hugging a headmaster or a tax inspector

You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.

For the first part of the journey Maia kept her eyes on the side of the road. Now that she was really leaving her friends it was hard to hold back her tears.
She had reached the gulping stage when she heard a loud snapping noise and turned her head. Miss Minton had opened the metal clasp of her large black handbag and was handing her a clean handkerchief, embroidered with the initial A.
"Myself," said the governess in her deep gruff voice, "I would think how lucky I was. How fortunate."
"To go to the Amazon, you mean?"
"To have so many friends who were sad to see me go."
"Didn't you have friends who minded you leaving?"
Miss Minton's thin lips twitched for a moment.
"My sister's canary, perhaps. If he had understood what was happening. Which is extremely doubtful.

Well wtith a statue hermann cannot possibly fight

Do you think there'll be someone in the Xanti who'll remember your mother?"
Finn blew on the embers. "I don't know. We may not find the Xanti," he warned her.
Maia shrugged. "It doesn't matter. But if we do, will they accept me? I don't have any Indian blood."
"If they don't, we won't stay. I wouldn't let anything happen to you. I've got my gun."
"I'm not scared," said Maia. And she wasn't. She'd been scared of the nastiness of the twins and of being shut up in the Carters' bungalow, but she wasn't scared of traveling through unknown lands with a boy hardly older than she was herself. She thought perhaps she wouldn't be scared of anything ever again if she was with Finn.

Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.

Slowly, Anna put up a hand to his muzzle and began to scratch that spot behind the ear where large dogs keep their souls.

She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence ... they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good ...

Do I know everything about him already? she thought, bewildered. And back came the answer: Everything. You are branded with this knowledge, you will have it for the rest of time.

To show too much joy in a place such as this would be unseemly but, as he padded toward her, his tail was extended in a manner which would make wagging possible should all go as expected.

It's true that adventures are good for people even when they are very young. Adventures can get in a person's blood even if he doesn't remember having them.

Daisy offered a mosquito which bit you and gave you yellow fever. 'You turn as yellow as a lemon and then you die,' she said.

After all, Betty was ill and she was her sister, and she wouldn't be able to shave her legs for weeks because of the plaster.

What do you mean to do with Maia when you do find her?" the professor asked that night.
"Take her back to the Keminskys and never let her out of my sight again," said Miss Minton.
"She may not find it easy."
"Why on earth not? The Keminskys are the kindest people in the world."
"Yes. But she has tasted freedom.

For whether a place is a heaven or a hell rests in yourself, and those who go with courage may find themselves in paradise.

Once the hag got upset she was apt to go downhill very fast and remember things like she was an orphan. People are often orphans when they are eighty-two, but it is true that when you have no mother or father you can feel very lonely at any age.

Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.