Philip Reeve Quotes

If only Myrtle would pay attention to the Boy's Own Journal, Blackwood's Magazine, etc., she would know that these creatures were Threls, who come from a worldlet called Threlfall on the far side of the asteroid belt. This Threlfall is a cheerless, chilly spot, and the whole history and religion of the Threls has been concerened with their quest to knit a nice woolly coverlet for it.

An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!

She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backward to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother's star charts like the map of a new constellation.

They're Hive Monks,' said Nova.

Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.

Nova shrugged, looking as if she had personally invented shrugging and hadn't quite sorted out the fine details yet.

I have had it with these dumb cakes on this dumb spaceship!

That's impossible,' said Fever, Engineerishly.

My name," the boy said importantly, "is Stacey de Lacey."
"But that's a girl's name!" blurted Oliver.
Stacey de Lacey's face turned a dark shade of red. "Silence!" he shouted. "Stacey is one of those names that can be for a boy or a girl! Like Hilary, or Leslie, or...um... Anyway...!

The Scriven men wore stack-heeled boots and pearl-studded evening coats; the ladies in their vast skirts looked like mythical creatures, half woman, half sofa.

The one thing worse than an enemy is a friend turned false.

Is it ... dead?" asked Tom, his voice all quivery with fright.
"A town just ran over him," said Hester. "I shouldn't think he's very well ...

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

Boo-Boo Pennyroyal did not like her male and female slaves to mingle. In the operas that she adored, young people brought together in tragic circumstances were forever falling in love with each other and then throwing themselves off things (cliffs, mostly, but sometimes battlements, or rooftops, or the brinks of volcanoes). Boo-Boo was fond of her slaves, and it pained her to think of them plummeting in pairs off the edges of Cloud 9, so she nipped all tragic love affairs firmly in the bud by forbidding the girls and boys to speak to one another. Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn't notice.

I don't travel much; I just stay at home and imagine weird places.

All it wants is to explode.'
'Nice to have an ambition in life, I suppose.

The closest she had been to them was certain summer evenings when they had gone for picnics in the magravine's ice-barge -- simple family affairs, just Freya and Mama and Papa and about seventy servants and courtiers

Personally, he much preferred to get them chatting. People were generally much less inclined to want to kill you once you'd chatted for a bit, and if they weren't, well, at least you could use the time to think of an escape plan.

Its a town eat town world

Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn't been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.

I am forever being captured these days. It isn't like me at all. You must think me such a silly princess.

As a child I always steered clear of science fiction, but in the autumn of 1977, the bow-wave of publicity for the first 'Star Wars' movie had already reached me, so I was eager for anything science-fictional.

Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine, and stumbled into the path of a religious procession - celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet, 'Hari, Hari! Hari Potter!'

I am Nom-O-Tron,' said the machine, in a big, boomy voice, so loud that Astra was afraid her mum and dad or some other grown-ups would hear and come to see who was sneaking a bedtime snack. 'Shhh!' she said. 'Have you got any biscuits?

They're only stories," he would say, "What do stories matter?" But he wasn't stupid. He knew as well as Myrddin that in the end stories are all that matter.

That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

Uncle knows best.

Sometimes, on our way through the world, we meet someone who touches our heart in a way others don't.

I had no idea I'd end up writing four books when I completed 'Mortal Engines.' I didn't even think it would find a publisher.

The old curator of ceramics lay near the door, looking indignant, as if death was a silly modern fad that he rather disapproved of.

Then, beaming at Tom and Caul, he topped up their glasses with more wine to wash down the pack of half-truths and outright lies he'd fed them

I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best-known books, the 'Mortal Engines' series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future.

The small lives of women don't make for good stories. That's why there were no girls in the stories Myrddin told, unless they were there as a prize for the hero to win at the end of his adventures.

You can't keep children in the nursery forever. If you do, they never become grown-ups, but they're not really children either. They are just pets.

Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore, except in Africa, and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew of Christians was that they worhsipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to things?

Uncle knows best.
-All the Lost Boys

It would be best to stride in with a cheer "hello!", but she wasn't the cheery sort; she was the "lurking in dark corners" sort. She found a dark corner, behind the Stalker-cases, and lurked.

The Jenny Haniver was repaired. He put his hand flat on the chart table and let the steady throb of Anchorage's engines beat against his palm, and it felt like home. In a cheap hotel behind Wolverinehampton's air-quay Widgery Blinkoe's five wives turned five

But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: That's one of the rules of the world.

Outside, Melliphant's ear flattened itself against the wood of the door like a pale slug.

And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city's wake.

He was going to miss everything. But he guessed that was how everybody always felt. Everyone was losing things, leaving things behind, clinging to old memories as they rushed into the future. Everyone was a passenger on a runaway train.

I'm sure it came as no surprise to my friends and family when I became an illustrator and then a writer because, from about the age of five, I was one of those children who always had his nose in a book.

I thought you'd say it might be a trap.'
'It might be trap,' he said.
'It doesn't feel like a trap.'
'Well it wouldn't, would it? Not if it was a good trap.

These are new worlds, Zen. We don't have to be what we were any more. We can be anything that we want. We can be humans together. - Nova

And isn't that what all boys want and all men, too? Just to be taken seriously?

I hate you! I hate you!" Hester was yelling
"Well I care about you, whether you like it or not!" Tom screamed.

I still feel, as I did when I was six or seven, that books are simply the best way to experience a story.

Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.

What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. "Good practice for life," Uncle said. "Hard knocks, that's all the world's about!" But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return.

It will be all right, Tom. Wherever we go now, whatever becomes of us, we'll be together, and it will all be all right.

But the look on his face was so strange that I hadn't the heart to take his story away from him. He believed it, see. He believed the old gods were on Arthur's side just as he believed that winter would follow autumn and the sun would rise tomorrow. And I thought that maybe that believing would make him strong and brave and lucky when the fighting came, and maybe without it he'd be killed, or turn and run away, which was worse than being killed. So I kept quiet.