Diana Wynne Jones Quotes

“Tantrums are seldom about the thing they appear to be about.”

“What a strange family you are! Is your name Lettie too?”

“By now it was clear that Howl was in a mood to produce green slime any second. Sophie hurriedly put her sewing away. "I'll make some hot buttered toast," she said. "Is that all you can do in the face of tragedy??" Howl asked. "Make toast!”

“I assure you, my friends, I am cone sold stober.”

“Learn to drive?"
"Never," said Quentin. "My mission in life is to be a passenger.”

“I’m beginning to think I’ve led a much too sheltered life.”

“But I do think that when people say 'a learning curve,' they make a mistake. Learning to me always seems to go in a straight, ignorant line and then, every so often, takes a jump straight upward.”

“Really, these wizards! You'd think no one had ever had a cold before! Well, what is it?" she asked, hobbling through the bedroom door onto the filthy carpet.
"I'm dying of boredom," Howl said pathetically. "Or maybe just dying.”

“I think we ought to live happily ever after.”

“I don’t think I will get married,” Polly said as she stood up. “I’m going to train to be a hero instead.”

“The truth between two people always cuts two ways.”

“You've no right to walk into people's castles and take their guitars.”

“I've often noticed" Fiona said, "that when people say, 'This can't happen in this day and age', they say it because it is happening.”

“But I discovered that people like me -- they do, you know, if you like them -- and then it was all right.”

“"Don't you even feel how marvellous it is to have talked to one of the Little People?" I said.
"No, not as the main thing," Grundo grunted. "If you think like that, then you're treating him like something in a museum, not as a person."”

“You must admit I have a right to live in a pigsty if I want.”

“Yes, you are nosy. You're a dreadfully nosy, horribly bossy, appallingly clean old woman. Control yourself. You're victimizing us all.”

“I'm going up to my room now, where I may die.”

“I am a believer in free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so.”

“Typical! I break my neck trying to get here, and I find you peacefully tidying up!”

“I'm delirious. Spots are crawling before my eyes."
"Those are spiders.”

“Take it from me, Fate doesn't care most of the time.”

“I've got a hangover."
"No, you hit your head on the floor."
"I can't stay. I've got to rescue that fool Sophie.”

“To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much.”

“I make that four horses and ten men just to get rid of one old woman. What did youto the King?”

“My shining dishonesty will be the salvation of me.”

“That's why I love spiders. 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.”

“So you were going to rescue the Prince! Why did you pretend to run away? To deceive the Witch?"

"Not likely! I'm a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I'm not doing it!”

“She said 'Over my dead body!' so I took her at her word.”

“Look. Survey. Inspect. My hair is ruined! I look like a pan of bacon and eggs!”

“Nobody gets praised for the right reasons.”

“Things are going round and round in my head--or maybe my head is going round and round in things.”

“A heart's a heavy burden.”

“Being a hero means ignoring how silly you feel.”

“A fickle heart is the only constant in this world”

“Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look.”

“Wizard Howl," said Wizard Suliman. "I must apologize for trying to bite you so often. In the normal way, I wouldn't dream of setting teeth in a fellow countryman.”

“He picked up the skull and knocked an onion ring out of its eye socket.
"I see Sophie has been busy again. Couldn't you have restrained her, my friend?" The skull yattered its teeth at him. Howl put it down rather hastily.”

“She was remorseless, but she lacked method.”

“Nobody can buy a hat without gossiping.”

“Interesting things did seem to happen, but always to somebody else.”

“All she heard next of the strange conversation behind the sofa was Mrs. Pendragon saying something about sending Twinkle (or was his name Howl?) to bed without supper and Twinkle daring her to 'jutht TRY it.”

“Howl’s voice was presently heard shouting weakly, “Help me, someone! I’m dying from neglect up here!”

“It's amazing the way one can take a step ten and a half miles long and still always land in a cowpat.”

“Sophie said a bad word. In the dim light she had stubbed her toe on one of the many dusty bricks piled around the place.
Naughty-naughty" Twinkle said.
Oh shut up!" Sophie said, standing on one leg to hold her toe. "Why don't you grow up?”

“Howl said to Sophie, "I've been wondering all along if you would turn out to be that lovely girl I met on May Day. Why were you scared then?”

“Annoyed?” said Sophie. “Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, and deafened everyone in Porthaven, and scared Calcifer to a cinder, and broke a few hundred hearts. Why should that annoy me?”

“Christopher discovered that you dealt with obnoxious masters and most older boys the way you dealt with governesses: you quite politely told them the truth in the way they wanted to hear it, so that they thought they had won and left you in peace.”

“In addition, Master Twinkle seems convinced that someone is denying him a pair of stripey trousers.”

“Goats," said Maxwell Hyde, "are a special case. Mad as hatters, all of them.”

“I could cut a star out of paper and drop it.”

“Sorry, I've had enough of running away, Sophie. Now I've got something I want to protect. It's you.”

“Chrestomanci smiled and swept out of the room like a very long procession of one person.”

“I seem to have excalibured this knife.”

“You cannot rob robbers with a kitten in your hat!”

“Settle for what you can get, but first ask for the World.”

“If you must know, I-I had never in my life kissed a young lady, and you are far too beautiful to me to want to get it wrong!”

“All these things that crib and cab in your brain, in your imagination, are in fact things that might well in later life drive you insane.”

“A garden should be natural-seeming, with wild sections, including a large area of bluebells.”

“Then watch out. I warn you!"

"That is very considerate of you," said Chrestomanci. "I like to be warned.”

“Alas, poor Yorick!" he said. "She heard mermaids, so it follows that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. I have caught an everlasting cold, but luckily I am terribly dishonest. I cling to that.”

“Not likely!” Howl yelled. “I’m a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell my self I’m not doing it!”

“Pray use both cats as sponges if it pleases you, infatuated infantryman.”

“I'll show you how," Peter said. "Stop hiding behind your ignorance.”

“And you're too nice," he added, above the lap-lap of the water and the patter of sand on the water-lily leaves. "I was relying on you being too jealous to let that demon near the place.”

“It was only when Shona, in sheer fury, turned the carnivorous sheep among them that they moved. They ran, some of them with charming little white sheep attached to their legs or backsides and the rest shouting about monsters.”