Quotes from book

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine, is it still in use? You are wondering, has it been cleaned? You may very well ask, was it thoroughly washed?”

“Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.”

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”

“All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this…”

“I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.”

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”

“I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.”

“Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.”

“On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts.”

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”

“I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”

“Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!”

“I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.”

“There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.”

“Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.”

“We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved.”

“I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.'
'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.”

“Oh Constance, we are so happy.”

“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”