Katherine Rundell Quotes

I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.

I think, actually, everyone starts out with some strange in them. It's just whether or not you decide to keep it.

Books crowbar the world open for you.

Only weak thinkers do not love the sky.

I know these sorts of people. They're not men. They're mustaches with idiots attached.

It's inhuman to take your books away before you know the end.

People say we can't do anything about the way the world is; they say it's set in stone. I say it looks like stone, but it's mostly paint and cardboard.

Stories can start revolutions.

Never ignore a possible. ~Charles

You have been the great green adventure of my life. Without you my days would be unlit.

Wolves, and stars, and snow: Those things made sense.

The set of her chin suggested she might have slain a dragon before breakfast. The look in her eyes suggested she might, in fact, have eaten it.

It was what her mother had always been. A place to put down her heart. A resting stop to recover her breath. A set of stars and maps.

But it's a child! You're a man!" "Your powers of observation are formidable," said Charles. "You are a credit to your optician.

Wolves are the witches of the animal world.

Perhaps, she thought, that’s what love does. It’s not there to make you feel special. It’s to make you brave. It was like a ration pack in the desert, she thought, like a box of matches in a dark wood. Love and courage, thought Sophie—two words for the same thing.

Adults are taught not to believe anything unless it is boring or ugly.

Reading is almost exactly like a cartwheel; it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless

It is difficult to believe extraordinary things.

He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.

You will never be tougher than you are now. Children are the toughest creatures on the planet. They endure.

Humans, on the whole, Feo could take or leave; there was only one person she loved properly, with the sort of fierce pride that gets people into trouble, or prison, or history books.

She hated official letters. They made her feel nervous. The people who wrote them sounded like they had filing cabinets where their hearts should be.

Cowardice is for cowards. Fear is for people with brains and eyes and functioning nerve endings.

It's dancing! It's magical, actually. A kind of slowish magic. Like writing with your feet.

If hope is a thing with feathers, then libraries are wings.

But those coins are wishes! You’re stealing other people’s wishes!” The look Matteo gave her was so flinty, she could have chipped a tooth on it. “If you have money to waste on wishes, you don’t need the wishes as badly as I need the money.

Sophie and Charles did not live neatly, but neatness, Sophie thought, was not necessary for happiness.

Governments can do both great and stupid things.

Children's books are not a hiding place, they are a seeking place.

You look as though you own a minimum of one pony.

If, when reading and walking at the same time, he bumped into a lamppost, he would apologize and check that the lamppost was unhurt.

Let me introduce you. Sophie, this is Miss Eliot, from the National Childcare Agency. Miss Eliot, this is Sophie, from the ocean.

Books crow-bar the world open for you.

Wolves, like children, are not meant to lead calm lives.

Feo wished she could explain - that the beauty of the world is itself a kind of company, and they lived in one of the most beautiful spots in the world. 'You can make the snow a kind of friend, if you know how.

You shouldn't say what you don't mean

The baby was almost certainly one year old. They knew this because of the red rosette pinned to her front, which read, 1! "Or rather," said Charles Maxim, "the child is either one year old or she has come first in a competition. I believe babies are rarely keen participants in competitive sport. Shall we therefore assume it is the former?

When you read children’s books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal,

It's like they've forgotten everything important, isn't it? I mean, forgotten things like cats and dancing exist.

Racism can't be cured by black excellence when it's caused by white ignorance.

It is difficult to sleep when you are besieged by hope.

Her face was built on the blueprint used for snow leopards and saints.

Look after the things you love, or else you don’t deserve to love anything,

But make sure the risks you take aren’t taken to impress someone else.

he had kindness where other people had lungs,

Feo shook her head; she couldn't speak. The moments in which the world turns suddenly kind can feel like a punctured lung. She stood in the marble hall and cried until tears flooded down her nose and chin and dropped on to the heads of the two bloodstained wolves at her feet.

It was never too late, she said, to turn a living thing around, and a garden was the most living of things.

Children’s books in the house can be a dangerous thing in hiding: a sword concealed in an umbrella.

Keep you secret, then, my darling. Everybody needs them. Secrets make you tough, and wily.

She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless.

I don't know where courage comes from. But I do know that if you can scrape together just a bit, more of it comes without your trying... So you don't need a great lump of bravery: only a tiny breath of it.

Children’s novels...spoke and still speak of hope. They say: look, this is what bravery looks like. This is what generosity looks like. They tell me, through the medium of wizards and lions and talking spiders, that this world we live in is a world of people who tell jokes and work and endure. Children’s books say: the world is huge. They say: hope counts for something. They say: bravery will matter, wit will matter, empathy will matter, love will matter. These things may or may not be true. I do not know. I hope they are.

Sometimes it seemed difficult for the adults in Sophie's life to tell between 'carried away' and 'absolutely correct but unbelieved.

I do, I'm afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.

The birds here make the birds in England look like they’re dressed for a job interview.

No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.

The dark-haired girl had the face of someone who had seen a lot, and wouldn’t mind punching most of it.

Everybody needs secrets. Only be sure they are good ones.

But the writing we call children’s fiction is not a childish thing: childish things include picking your nose and eating the contents, and tantruming at the failure to get your own way. The 45th President of America is childish. Children’s fiction has childhood at its heart, which is not the same thing.

Mothers are a thing you need, like air, she thought, and water. Even paper mothers were better than nothing; even imaginary ones. Mothers were a place to put down your heart. They were a resting stop to recover your breath.

A beetle lumbered up onto her arm, and she stilled herself, enjoying the tickling feeling of its thread-thin feet. It was deep green with shimmers of blue and turquoise, with pitch-black legs. She kissed it very softly. If happiness were a color, it would be the color of this beetle, thought Wil.

If you have money to waste on wishes, you don't need the wishes as badly as I need the money.

Her voice, he thought, was like water running over pebbles in sunshine.

He was not tall or broad, but when he grinned it was so vivid that he appeared to take up most of the street and at least half the sky.

He’d intended it to sound reassuring, but instead his voice had landed somewhere between “desperate lying” and “stern aunt on a deathbed.

And what is love at first sight but recognition?

I wish for someone to be with. I wish to be un-alone.” He hoped shooting stars did not care about grammar.

I just liked the idea that there's still things that we don't know. At school, it's the same thing, every day. I liked that it might be all right to believe in large, mad, wild things.

For reading not to become something that we do for anxious self-optimisation – for it not to be akin to buying high-spec trainers and a gym membership each January – all texts must be open, to all people.

Crawling through dark tunnels in the company of hobbits, standing in front of oncoming trains waving a red flag torn from a petticoat: to read alone is to step into an infinite space where none can follow.

To the three men in gray coats and golden buttons just cresting the hill, the pantomime was a strange one. The speck of green merged with the gray, and the black with the flash of red, as they shot off toward north.

When Sophie had first learned to read, Charles had kept the whisky in a bottle labeled CAT'S URINE, so that Sophie would not touch it, but she had uncorked the bottle and sipped it, and then sniffed at the underside of the cat next door. They were not at all similar, though equally unpleasant.

The difficulties with the rule of readerly progression are many: one is that, if one followed the same pattern into adulthood, turning always to books of obvious increasing complexity, you’d be left ultimately with nothing but Finnegans Wake and the complete works of the French deconstructionist theorist Jacques Derrida to cheer your deathbed.

Neither could speak. It was the day that a silence settled on the pair of them, and they were bound close by it. Will felt, in that moment, too small to face such misery, but she knew that she would have to expand now, with a terrible rush, to fill the empty space.

I might not have told you if I'd known why you were asking.

I think, actually, everyone starts out with some strange in them. It's just whether or not you decide to keep it.

Oh.' A syllable can express a great deal. Will's sounded of resignation but also of swear words, and the smell of rotting vegetation, and wary amusement and bitten fingernails.

I was afraid that my heart had simply...run out. But it transpires that the heart has its own petrol station, its own coal, it's own soap. It will renew, so use it hugely.

Hard work always hurts somewhere.

Muscles, she thought, are a thing worth having. They make the world easier to reach.

God could arrest you for this,’ said Sergei. ‘This is better than murder.

Resist the urge to arrange your fears and angers at their most becoming angles.

The set of her chin suggested she might have slain a dragon before breakfast. The look in her eyes suggested she might, in fact, have eaten

Her finger was still bleeding, so she drew a flower behind the woman’s ear, and coloured it red.

Men! I know these sorts of people. They’re not men. They’re moustaches with idiots attached.

Never ignore a possible

Children are the toughest creatures on the planet, They endure

Children’s books today do still have the ghost of their educative beginnings, but what they are trying to teach us has changed. Children’s novels, to me, spoke, and still speak, of hope.

To throw the knife would be death...She wanted nothing to do with death--nothing to do with finality, with endings, with the dark of it. She hated the man more than she hated any living thing, but he was living.

I still find libraries astonishing; I still think they speak to our better instincts. The library remains one of the few places in the world where you don’t have to buy anything, know anyone or believe anything to enter in.

If music can shine, Sophie thought, this music shone... 'It's like eight thousand birds, Charles!' When the music closed, she clapped until the rest of the audience had stopped and until her hands were hot and blotched with red... There was something in the music that felt familiar to Sophie. 'It feels,' she said to Charles, 'like home.

It's best not to get too hungry if you can avoid it. If you get hungry enough, you will start feeling that your bad ideas are your good idea. If you get truly famished, you'll start feeling like a French philosopher, and that's unwise.

Intoxicated with her success and his awed eyes, and with the way the wind rushed by and flicked delicate strands of saliva across her cheeks, Will spread out her arms, spun in a pirouette. Shumba chose that moment to stumble over a rabbit hole and with a terrific crash, that sounded and resounded for miles and miles of flei, Will fell into the long grass.

apples; then sausage rolls, shedding their pastry all over his coat, and a thick slab of yellow cheese. From the back of his fob watch Charles extracted a screw of salt. Finally, like a conjuror, he took from under his hat half a roast chicken, wrapped in oiled paper.

He told her about the small officers' library, too, from which he sometimes stole books. 'They're the only good thing about the whole place. I sleep with a dictionary under my pillow, sometimes. Just to remind me that there are more words in the world than 'Come here, boy.

When you get home, tell them how large the world is, and how green. And tell them that the beauty of the world makes demands on you. They will need reminding. If you believe the world is small and tawdry, it is easier to be so yourself. But the world is so tall and so beautiful a place.

Children’s fiction needs to widen and change again, as it has widened and transformed before. Recently a study of children’s fiction in the UK showed that only four per cent of books published in a year had any characters who were black, Asian or minority ethnic, but that 31.2 per cent of school children are from minority ethnic origins.

Quite suddenly Sophie couldn't bear it. She pelted up to her bedroom, tripping over the stairs. The tears in her eyes were making the world blur... She stamped and kicked... It took her some minutes to realize that Charles was standing in the doorway... 'This calls for hot water... Get in the tub, Sophie, and do some splashing. You will be surprised at what a difference splashing can make.

There were, in Feo's experience, five kinds of cold. There was wind cold, which Feo barely felt. It was fussy and loud and turned your cheeks as red as if you'd been slapped, but couldn't kill you even if it tried. There was snow cold, which plucked at your arms and chapped your lips, but brought real rewards. It was Feo's favorite weather: The snow was soft and good for making snow wolves. There was ice cold, which might take the skin off your palm if you let it, but probably wouldn't if you were careful. Ice cold smelled sharp and knowing. It often came with blue skies and was good for skating. Feo had respect for ice cold. Then there was hard cold, which was when the ice cold got deeper and deeper until at the end of a month you couldn't remember if the summer had ever really existed. Hard cold could be cruel. Birds died in midflight. It was the kind of cold that you booted and kicked your way through. And then there was blind cold. Blind cold smelled of metal and granite. It took all the sense out of your brain and blew the snow into your eyes until they were glued shut and you had to rub spit into them before they would blink. Blind cold was forty degrees below zero. This was the kind of cold that you didn't sit down to think in, unless you wanted to be found dead in the same place in May or June. Feo had felt blind cold only once.