Ransom Riggs Quotes

If we've considered all the worst possibilities and one turns out to be true, we won't be completely unprepared for it.

If you must fail, fail spectacularly.

Find the bird, find the loop, Yakob vai don't you understand you goddamned stupid yutzi

Brief prayers were muttered for Martin's soul, and then people began trading theories. Within minutes the place was a smoke-filled den of tipsy Sherlock Holmses.

He isn't normal," Emma said, grimacing as if this were the direst insult. "He's one of us!

Enoch's jaw fell open. "Are you telling me these chickens lay exploding eggs?!" he said. "Only when they get excited," said Addison. "Most of their eggs are quite safe - and delicious! But it was the exploding ones that earned them their rather unkind name: Armageddon chickens.

We all scooted closer on our stools, like it was story-time in some morbid kindergarten.

When we broke the surface again the first thing I saw was the great bold stripe of the Milky Way painted across the heavens, and it occurred to me that together the fish and the stars formed a complete system, coincident parts of some ancient and mysterious whole.

There are three Smart Aids in Englewood, the small, somnolent beach town where I live. There are twenty-seven in Sarasota County, and one hundred and fifteen in all of Florida,

The man was an emotional Fort Knox.

They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how we interfere." "Which is why you can't go back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war from happening," said Enoch. "History heals itself. Isn't that interesting?

There was a direct correlation between how nervous I was and how many dumb jokes I made.

Beyond our grim circle, the underground station looked like the aftermath of a nightclub bombing. Steam from burst pipes shrieked forth in ghostly curtains. Splintered monitors swung broken-necked from the ceiling. A sea of shattered glass spread all the way to the tracks, flashing in the hysterical strobe of red emergency lights like an acre-wide disco ball.

But you can't feel bad every second, I wanted to tell her. Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.

seen this look on his face before, and I knew exactly what "some time" meant: hours and hours. "Then I'll go find the house by myself," I said. "Not alone, you aren't. You promised." "Then I'll find a person who

But you can't feel bad every second[ ... ] Laughing doesn't make bad thing worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human. But i didn't know how to say this, either.

The citizenry's primary occupations are rubbish picking and luring strangers into the Acre to cosh them on the head and rob them. For amusement, they ingest whatever flammable liquids are at hand and sing badly at the top of their lungs. The area's main exports are smelted iron slag, bone meal, and misery.

Not to mention the lack of a seatbelt on a horse

I tried to imagine telling my parents the truth. In that regard, the phone conversation is had with my father in the Underground had been a preview of coming attractions. He's lost it. Our son is insane. Or on drugs. Or maybe not in enough drugs.

I discovered Emerson's soporific qualities by falling asleep with my face in the book, drooling all over an essay called 'Self-Reliance' ...

My parents treated me like a breakable heirloom, afraid to fight or fret in front of me least I shatter.

And so Enoch held up Miss Peregrine's cage and she let out a great screeching cry. We answered with a cry of our own, both a victory yell and a lament, for everything lost and yet to be gained.

Whenever I try to map things out they inevitably change. Which doesn't mean I don't map them out - I just try to embrace the better ideas that come along as my fingers are flying around the keyboard mid-draft!

Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid..and wish you'd just stayed in bed?

They were natural storytellers and beautiful singers; innately charming people who treated us like long-lost cousins.

I own a few thousand snapshots, which is small by the standards of most collectors I know. I generally only buy photos I think I may actually be able to use in a book one day. I need that focus when buying, because without it I'd just buy everything and my house would be overrun with bucket loads of snapshots; there are just too many beautiful images in the world, and I'd need to own them all.

You're upset, you're cold, and you're wet, wouldn't you rather discuss all this over a pot of hot tea?
Yes, but I wasn't going to say so.

It was a constant struggle for me, having no idea what tomorrow held. I'm cautious by nature, a planner - someone who likes to know what's around the next corner and the corner after that - and

All my life, normal people had mostly baffled me-the ridiculous ways they strove to impress one another, the mediocre goals that seemed to drive them, the banality of their dreams. The way people rejected anything that didn't fit their narrow paradigm of acceptability, as if those who thought or acted or dressed or dreamed differently from them were a threat to their very existence.

There was something almost regal about him, I thought; a defiance I admired. He was a holdout who refused to give up his post. The last watchman at the end of the world.

E had trampled her poor, pining heart, and the wound was still raw, even these many years later.

The other [picture] was a ruined village made up of rubble and cracked houses and trees raked clean of bark. Just looking at it,I could almost hear a lonely wind blowing; the palpable silence of a place robbed suddenly of life.

Only birds can manipulate time. Therefore, all time manipulators must be able to take the form of a bird.

Maybe. Maybe there was a way. And then things could be so good.
My brain was a hope-making machine.

How many times must I tell you," She called after him, "polite persons do not take their supper in the nude!

So it's not even a decision, really. You stay. It's only later - years later - that you begin to wonder what might've happened if you hadn't.

There´s always use in fighting," said Emma. "Especially when it makes terrible people cry.

What if there's no town for fifty kilometers?" Said Enoch.
"The we'll walk for fifty-one kilometers. But I know we weren't blown that far off course.

Dogs can't speak English. Nor any human language - save, in one notable exception, Luxembourgish, which is only comprehensible to bankers and Luxembourgers, and therefore hardly of any use at all. No, you've eaten something disagreeable and are having a nightmare, that's all.

When I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After.

There were wooden toys moldering in a box; crayons on a windowsill, their colors dulled by the light of ten thousand afternoons; a dollhouse with dolls inside, lifers in an ornate prison. In a modest library, the creep of moisture had bowed the shelves into crooked smiles.

I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn't know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn't care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather's family had been taken from him and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn't have a dad. And how I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling down house and crying hot stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy year old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom.

That was our friendship: equal parts irritation and cooperation.

Jacob, inspector of shadows, miraculous interpreter of squirmy gut feelings, seer and slayer of real and actual monsters -

You used Neverleak," Shelley said, eyeing my craftsmanship with a skeptical frown. "The sale's on Stay-Tite." Shelley was the store manager, and her slumped shoulders and dour expression were as much a part of her uniform as the blue polo shirts we all had to wear.

Oggie sat facing us in a threadbare blazer and pajama bottoms, as if he'd been expecting company
just not pants-worthy company
...

I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn't a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn't we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.

A world so afraid of otherness.

For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved.

Beyond the iced windows the sun was sinking. Shadows bloomed across the walls and multiplied in the stairwells, and as the light died it got bluer, painting everything around me a deep-sea cobalt.

Such was the way the sad world turned.

Other words, of mastering time without being mastered by death.

I didn't know you could fry toast, I remarked, to which Kev replied that there wasn't a food he was aware of that couldn't be improved by frying.

I needed all of it. Both families, both families, both Jacobs - all of Emma. I knew I would have to chose, and I was afraid it would split me in half.

I wanted to tell her then that I loved her. I thought that might help, by grounding us in something we were sure about rather than everything we weren't.

I knew then that my shaky faith in myself was starting to dig a hole in hers, and Emma's confidence was what held everything together.

We're peculiar," he replied, sounding a bit puzzled. "Aren't you?

I do," he replied.
And that was all it took.

An opportunist disguised as a friend can be every bit as dangerous as an outright enemy.

And that is how someone who is unusally susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies and the Seeing Things That Aren't Really There talks himself into making one last trip to the abandoned, almost-certainly-haunted house where a dozen or more children met their untimely end.

Kev was out running an errand, and because asking one of his drunken regulars to chaperone me seemed like a bad idea, I went into the nearest shop to ask someone who was at least gainfully employed. The door read FISHMONGER. I pushed it open to find myself cowering before a bearded giant in a blood-soaked apron. He left off decapitating fish to glare at me, dripping cleaver in hand, and I vowed never again to discriminate against the intoxicated. "What

This is a madhouse!" said Horace. Deirdre laughed. "No, doveling. It's a menagerie.

I was here for a reason. There was something I was meant not simply to be, but to do- and it wasn't to run or hide or give up the minute things seemed terrifying and impossible.

Still having nightmares? I've got something for that. Panic attack on the school bus? This should do the trick. Can't sleep? Let's up the dosage. All those pills were making me fat and stupid, and I was still miserable, getting only three or four hours of sleep a night.

You're right, Dad. Dr. Golan did help me. But that doesn't mean he has to control every aspect of my life. I mean, Jesus, you and mom might as well buy me one of those little bracelets that says, What Would Golan Do? That way I can ask myself before I do anything. Before I take a dump. How would Dr. Golan want me to take this dump? Should I bank it off the side or go straight down the middle? What would be the most psychologically beneficial dump I could take?

And I knew that the minute I got cocky - the minute I stopped being pants-wettingly terrified of hollowgast - something terrible would happen.

Ahh," Sharon said airily from the corner, "the sweet lies lovers tell ...

Have they built cities on the moon?" another boy asked hopefully.
"We left some garbage and a flag there in the sixties, but thats about it.

Survive, yes - but at what cost?

That house is such an emotionally loaded place for you, just being inside was enough to trigger a stress reaction.

Grandpa Portman really knew how to keep a secret, didn't he?""Are you kidding? The man was an emotional Fort Knox.

There were too many things to be terrified of, a hundred horror scenarios all vying for attention in my brain.

I hope I'll be able to come home, someday. But there are things I need to do first. I just want you to know I love you and Mom, and I'm not doing any of this to hurt you." "We love you, too, Jake, and if it's drugs, or whatever it is, we don't care. We'll get you right again. Like I said, you're confused." "No, Dad. I'm peculiar.

Maybe it was childish, this old urge to explore for exploring's sake. There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just

The trouble with the merely unwise/deeply stupid line is that you often don't know which side you're on until it's too late.

You have your world to rebuild, and I have mine.

Emma laughed darkly. "It's a completely mad idea, I know. But my brain is a hope-making engine."
"I'm so glad," I said. "Mine is a worst-case-scenario generator."
"We need each other, then."
"Yes. But we already knew that, I think.

pedigree whose odor even the forest of air-freshener trees he'd hung from the mirror couldn't mask.

What're you going to do," he said, "pollinate it to death?

I'll never understand ninety-nine percent of humanity. - Enoch

The bird only keeps good things about the future to herself, but you can bet we hear all the brown-trouser bits.

You're the most obviously peculiar bunch of peculiars I've ever laid eyes on.

We slid down on our behinds, little avalanches of sand pouring around our feet and down our pants.

I knew then that, from now on, every word that passed between us would hurt, would be wrapped up with and marked by the pain of this moment, and that I needed to pull away now or it would never stop. So I nodded sadly, hugged her one more time, and retreated to a corner to sleep, because I was very, very tired.

I felt ashamed for having been jealous of his life, considering the price he'd paid for it, and I tried to feel lucky for the safe and unextraordinary one that I had done nothing to deserve

At the heart of nature's mystery lies another mystery.

Because, I thought, a line from Tolkien materializing in my head, one does not simply walk into Mordor.

Forgive me. I continue to underestimate the breadth of your ignorance.

Fictions, whoppers and paradiddles.

Even here - running for our lives, sleeping exposed, facing death - even here, in her arms, I was able to find some measure of peace.

We were like astronauts floating through a starless universe.

Dylan laughed and they exchanged a series of complex, multistage handshake-fist-bump-high-fives.

I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.

There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just another dusty fact in a book, sapped of mystery. So maybe it was better to leave a few spots on the map blank. To let the world keep a little of its magic, rather than forcing it to divulge every last secret. Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

If even outcasts and downtrodden folk like yourselves can't muster a bit of compassion for others, then there's no hope for this world.

I felt like one of those mythical heroes who fights his way back from the underworld only to realize that the world above is every bit as damned as the one below.

Destiny is for people in books about magical swords.

I continued, louder. "I miss my grandfather every day, but a very smart friend once told me that everything happens for a reason. If I hadn't lost him, well, I never would've found you. So I guess I had to lose one part of my family to find another. Anyway, that's how you make me feel. Like family. Like one of you.

If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.

No one can hurt you as badly as the people you love.