Susan Cooper Quotes

So the shortest day came, and the year died.

Any great gift of power or talent is a burden ... But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law.

Engage, Enlighten, Encourage and especially ... just be yourself! Social media is a community effort, everyone is an asset.

Will picked a single blossom from a gorse bush beside him; it shone bright yellow on his grubby hand. "People are very complicated," he said sadly.
"So they are," John Rowlands said. His voice deepened a little, louder and clearer than it had been. "But when the battles between you and your adversaries are done, Will Stanton, in the end the fate of all the world will depend on just those people, and on how many of them are good or bad, stupid or wise. And indeed it is all so complicated that I would not dare foretell what they will do with their world. Our world.

Little Hawk, it is not for us to tell how great and terrible things come about. Only the Great Spirit can see all.

So the Dark did a simple thing. They showed the maker of the sword his own uncertainty and fear. Fear of having done the wrong thing
fear that having done this one great thing, he would never again be able to accomplish anything of great worth
fear of age, of insufficiency, of unmet promise. All such great fears, that are the doom of people given the gift of making, and lie always somewhere in their minds.

It is a burden ... (M)ake no mistake about that. Any great gift or power or talent is a burden and this more than any, and you will long to be free of it. But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law."
- Susan Cooper ("Merriman" The Dark is Rising)

The surface of the iron was irregular, but though it showed no sign of having been polished it was completely smooth - smooth in a way that reminded him of a certain place in the rough stone floor of the kitchen, where all the roughness had been worn away by generations of feet turning to come round the corner from the door.

For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it. Old One, do we not? For ever and ever ... so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time.

He was not for that moment a human being, but a frenzied creature possessed by rage, turned into an animal. All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it always will be, the most dreadful sight in the world.

For him, Halloween was not All Hallows Eve

For this was Christmas, which had always been a time of magic, to him and to all the world.

And at the last all shall be safe, and evil thrust out never to return. And so that the trust be kept, he said, I give it into your charge, and your sons', and your sons' sons, until the day come.

Honest. I know. But all the same ... woo!" It was a head-back, beaming, yelping shout of joyful excitement, spontaneous and startling, and every face turned; their apprehensiveness faded for a moment, and even Merriman, stern for the first instant, laughed aloud. "Yes!" he said. "We need that as much as the sword, Barney.

Still in the black hemisphere the stars blazed and slowly wheeled; beneath them, Will felt so infinitesimally small that it seemed impossible he should even exist. Immensity pressed in on him, terrifying, threatening
and then, in a swift flash of movement like a dance, like the glint of a leaping fish, came a flick of brightness in the sky from a shooting star ... He heard Bran give a small chirrup of delight, a spark struck from the same bright sudden joy that filled his own being.

You remember the fairy tales you were told when you were very small - 'once upon a time ... ' Why do you think they always began like that?"
"Because they weren't true," Simon said promptly.
Jane said, caught up in the unreality of the high remote place, "Because perhaps they were true once, but nobody could remember them.

Never dismiss anyone's value until you know him.

Real is a hard word", he said. "Almost as hard as true, or now...

Tommy looked blank. "What's a flashlight?"
"You don't have flashlights?" Jessup said. "Jeeze! A cylinder, like, with batteries inside it, and a light bulb behind glass at one end
"
Tommy's blue eyes glinted dangerously. "We have a thing in Scotland that's a cylinder too. Very thin, made of wood, with graphite in the center. We call it a pencil."
Jessup hooted. "You think we don't have pencils?"
"You think we don't have flashlights?" Tommy snapped. "That's just American dialect. In the English language they're called torches."
Emily said mildly, "Actually we're Canadians.

The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.

They walked as old friends walk, without often speaking, sharing the kind of silence that is not so much silence as a kind of still communication.

The Age of the Screen isn't going to go away; indeed it offers all kinds of wonderful possibilities, if it could just acquire a little more quality control. But there is one truth, one necessary dictum, that we must never forget: _Every child should be encouraged to read books, words on a page, for his or her own pleasure, in his own time, dreaming his own - and the author's - dream_. There is no substitute. None.

He was woken by music. It beckoned him, lilting and insistent; delicate music, played by delicate instruments that he could not identify, with one rippling, bell-like phrase running through it in a gold thread of delight. There was in this music so much of the deepest enchantment of all his dreams and imaginings that he woke smiling in pure happiness at the sound.

They came generally from people writing theses on fantasy or on the Dark Is Rising books. They were full of questions I'd never thought about and false assumptions that I didn't want to think about. They would ask me in great detail for, say, the specific local and mythical derivations of my Greenwitch, a leaf-figure thrown over a Cornish cliff as a fertility sacrifice, and I would have to write back and say, "I'm terribly sorry; I made it all up." They told me I echoed Hassidic myth, which I hadn't read, and the Mormon suprastructure, which I'd never even heard of. They saw symbols and buried meanings and allegories everywhere. I'd thought I was making a clear soup, but for them it was a thick mysterious stew.

from "In Defense of the the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983)

Great-Uncle Merry, coming back towards the car from the Grey House, had suddenly stopped in his tracks in the middle of the road. He was gazing down at the sea; and she realised that he had caught sight of the yacht. What startled her was the expression on his face. Standing there like a craggy towering statue, he was frowning, fierce and intense, almost as if he were looking and listening with senses other than his eyes and ears. He could never look frightened, she thought, but this was the nearest thing to it that she had ever seen. Cautious, startled, alarmed . . . what was the matter with him? Was there something strange about the yacht? Then

Writing is one of the loneliest professions in the world because it has to be practiced in this very separate private world, in _here_. Not in the mind; in the imagination. And I think it is possible that the writing of fantasy is the loneliest job of the lot, since you have to go further inside. You have to make so close a connection with the unconscious that the unbiddable door will open and the images fly out, like birds.

So it will go," Merriman said. "He will have a sweet picture of the Dark to attract him, as men so often do, and beside it he will set all the demands of the Light, which are heavy and always will be.

Sometimes you must seem to hurt something in order to do good for it.

The truth is that every book we read, like every person we meet, has the capacity to change our lives. And though we can be sure our children will meet people, we must, must create, these days, their chance to meet books.

She understood about the comfort you can get from a small separate world, whether it's a theatre or a basketball team or the inside of a book.

The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world. That wide grey sweep was the lawn, with the straggling trees of the orchard still dark beyond; the white squares were the roofs of the garage, the old barn, the rabbit hutches, the chicken coops. Further back there were only the flat fields of Dawson's farm, dimly white-striped. All the broad sky was grey, full of more snow that refused to fall. There was no colour anywhere.

Every human being who loves another loves imperfection, for there is no perfect being on this earth
nothing is so simple as that.

Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes; blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads.

For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you.

Your father ... doesn't work late for you to pinch his dinner.

There was something about Christmas Eve, they both felt, that demanded company; one needed somebody to whisper to, during the warm beautiful dream-taut moments between hanging the empty stocking at the end of the bed, and dropping into the cosy oblivion that would flower into the marvel of Christmas morning.

It says, loving doesn't change just because someone isn't there, or because time gets in the way, or even death. It's always with you, keeping you safe, it won't ever leave you.

Every man has a last choice after the first, a chance of forgiveness. It is not too late. Turn. Come to the Light.

Wish on a star, said a tiny voice in his head from some long-departed day of early childhood: Wish on a star
the cry of pleasure and faith as ancient as the eyes of man.

No, he didn't win, Great-Uncle Merry said, and even in the clear afternoon sunshine he seemed with every word to become more remote, as ancient as the rock behind him and the old world of which he spoke.

But the slice-of-life novel is really not so much a world apart as an interlude - like the conference or the film set, the holiday hotel or the voyage by sea or air. You enter it, you live there for a while, you leave again. Perhaps it will alter you; usually it will not. I suspect that the book which takes you into a world apart must also _trouble_ you, at least a little. And the troubling stays with you, like the grit in the oyster, and afterwards you are changed.

Minds hold more than they know.

Too many!' James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.

Whatever happens, believe that the journey is worth taking, and then you will reach its end.

The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the out-buildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away.

Funny,' Will said, as they picked their way through. 'Things are absolutely awful and yet people look much happier than usual. Look at them all. Bubbling.'
'They are English,' Merriman said.
'Quite right,' said Will's father. 'Splendid in adversity, tedious when safe. Never content, in fact. We're an odd lot….

The children stared at him, awed and a little afraid. For a moment he was a stranger, someone they did not know. Jane had a sudden fantastic feeling that Great-Uncle Merry did not really exist at all, and would vanish away if they breathed or spoke.

All life is theatre,' he said. 'We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves ...

Words stretch the muscles of the imagination. Continual placid acceptance of ready-made visual images turns the imagination into a couch-potato.

It's all right! Simon said hoarsely. Hastily he cleared his throat and put his shoulders back, though it was hard to recover dignity in pajamas.

In the end, all it takes is one small action, by one person. One at a time.

The night became silver again; looking up, it was as if they saw the moon sailing through the clouds instead of the other way around; racing smoothly across the sky, passing puffs and wisps of cloud on either side, and yet never moving from its place.