Marcus Sedgwick Quotes

I'm just a girl in a nurse's uniform, but that doesn't mean I know how to save these men, and they- they are men in uniforms, but that doesn't mean they know how to die.

Slowly he had learned that there is a world beneath the visible one, and that people, some people at least, have a different life, that they carry inside them.

They said something funny. They said, 'Even God leaves on the last boat from Nome.' What does that mean?

It was like a new kind of vision, seeing with eyes as keen as scalpel blades, that cut away desires and emotions and wishful thinking and left only what was fact.

There never was a story that was happy through and through.

Yes. You see, the whole nature, shape and even the modern blue pigment of the TARDIS is so deeply unfamiliar to the primitive mind that, although the optic nerve registers its presence, the brain cannot decode what it is seeing. The primitive visual cortex is unable to relay information about it consciously to the viewer. In effect, even though her chameleon circuit is still damaged, she's as good as invisible. She'll be just fine.

You know they used to use nails," he says. "In the old days. Poor folks still do. Not the best idea, a nail in a coffin." Bowman says nothing, but in his mind, he asks, Coffin? The man nods, smiling. He picks up something now, and shows it to Bowman, for inspection. It is a long brass screw. "That's better," he says. "Better than a nail. Notice anything about it?" Bowman shakes his head. "The screw runs widdershins. Back to front. 'Gainst the clock. All the other screws in the world turn the other way to this one. But coffin screws are different. " Bowman forms a word in his mind. Why? The coffin maker smiles. "To stop them from coming back, of course.

One of the advantages of having a binary vascular system was that he could always pump his blood faster than normal if he chose to, raising his body temperature at will.

A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood.

You will never find it," his ghost says. "What?" "What you are looking for. You want to go back to the start. You want to go back to where you began. You want to find the happiness you once had. But you can never get there, because even if you somehow found it, you yourself would be different. You would have changed, from your journey alone, from the passing of time, if nothing else. You can never make it back to where you began, you can only ever climb another turn of the spiral stair. Forever.

If I were dead, I wouldn't be sad, and I wouldn't be glad, because I wouldn't be.

Love, sing, cry, and fight, but all the time, seek to know everything you can about the earth upon which you stand, till your time is done.

You have life written all over you. Some people bear tragedy on their faces; loss, death, whatever it might be. But you have life.

The first thought was this: that he was a foolish old man, because all his life he'd been looking for something and it was only when Anna joined him in the bar that evening that he realized that home is not something you find outside yourself; home is something you carry inside you, and it's made from the memories of the people you love, and the people who have loved you.

Eric Seven does not believe in love at first sight.
He corrects himself.
Even in that moment, the moment that it happens, he fees his journalist's brain make a correction, rubbing out a long-held belief, writing a new one in its place.
He did not believe in love at first sight. He thinks he might do so now.

He had learned something already in the course of his journey. If you carried a closed wooden box, people want to know what is in it.

If I can see the future, then what does that mean? It would be like knowing the end of a story right from the start, almost as if you were reading it backwards.
And who wants to know how their own story ends?

Secondly, I continued my education in a more important way,
through the observation of everyone around me,
because nothing is more important to learn in life than
the interaction of a human being with another human being.

All he felt was that same feeling he'd always had, that he was looking for something, whose name he didn't even know, and yet now, in the dark of the night and with his father had gone to wherever his mother had gone before, with Anna sitting beside him, he suddenly knew its name. Home.

Edward looks wistfully at Mat, and while the girls are pretty, Nancy particularly, it is Mat who thinks about the most, because he wished he'd been more like Mat when he was young.
If he'd been more like Mat, more confident, maybe he wouldn't have missed his chances in life, chances that sometimes only came along once. Sometimes there are single moments, he thinks, where your path divides, your life can go one way, so very different from another. Work out well, rather than be a failure. And if you miss those chances, he thinks, well, is that it?

If a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection?

Maybe he knows noting. Maybe it's that he feels it all, but whatever is happening to him, he understands that he lived before. He lived other lives, in different times. And why not? It's something he has often wondered about, sitting on the train in the morning, looking from the corner of his eye at the other commuter, wondering why.
Why am I not living that person's live? That man, there, with the sharp suit and the slightly stupid tie? Or that scruffy guy with the headphones? Or that woman, a little pregnant?
Often, as he sat fiddling with OneDegree, he has wondered why this life is the one he's had, and not one of the thousands of contacts passing through his device, or one of the countless others that could have been his.
Now he knows. He has been others.

I might have been normal but if I was I cannot remember that time.

...people burn books, and that they ban books is, in a way, a good sign. It's a good sign because it means books have power. When people burn books, it's because they're afraid of what's inside them...

Remember this: every man has to find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved. I believe that. You just have to find out what it is you're looking for.

Yet every writer worth a good-god damn knows this too, for it is graven into each of us: no one cares for beauty. Not in fiction. Not on its own, not pure, untroubled beauty; not in fiction. [...] For here is the only real difference between the life of reality and the life of fiction. Fiction only works when the beauty is tainted by pain. For fiction is not about life; it's about the troubles of life.

Cold didn't worry him unduly. Given that his normal body temperature was way below human levels, the dip in the river had been no more than refreshing, certainly not deadly.

There's always a third choice in life. Even if you think you're stuck between two impossible choices, there's always a third way. You just have to look for it.

If. The smallest word, which raises the biggest questions.

People think I have so much faith in myself, but I have none. I have no faith in myself, or in what I can do, and yet people think I can do anything I want.
That's how I seem, but it's an illusion. It's an act, nothing more.

Temporal grace,' said the Doctor. 'No weapons can function inside the TARDIS – even something as simple as a spear.

Almost everyone has an inborn need to create; in most people this is thwarted and forgotten, and the drive is pushed into other activities that are less threatening, less difficult, and less rewarding. In some people, that need to create is transmuted into the need to destroy.

He wonders if a few moments of utter and total joy can be worth a lifetime of struggle.
Maybe, he thinks. Maybe, if they're the right moments.

He'd watch the loading and unloading of boats; the building of houses, shacks, and huts; and above all, the people, each carrying a bundle of stories inside them.

The time for princes and tsars and grand duchesses and especially holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, of murder and assassination. The bear had already become what it had been waiting to be, and the men who set it on its journey changed too. Lev became Trotsky, Vladimir took the name Lenin, and they stepped into a bright and furious modern world; blood red, and snow white.

Why were there some people who seemed so sure of themselves that it made him feel small and ignorant by comparison, as if they had a script to life with all the answers on it? He felt he didn't even know the questions.

One final time I told myself I wasn't abducting my little brother.

And that was how the young writer found love, just when he had stopped looking for it.

She risked her life to put your mind at rest,' Evgenia said. 'How great is love!