Lynne Reid Banks Quotes

The very people you trusted most could become like strangers in their longing...

Most men, if you just tell them what to do in a businesslike fashion, will follow directions without thinking about it. One proceeds on the assumption that they'll do as they're told, and they do.

That it's possible to be against the circus, not because you're afraid to die there, but because it's wicked and wrong. ~Aurelia, 152

the fun of keeping things in them. He was not a very tidy boy in general, but he did like arranging things in cupboards and drawers and then opening them later and finding them just as he’d left them.

The Spring can be more painful than any other time of the year. Summer is lazy and indifferent. Autumn is demanding and invigorating. Winter is numb and self-contained, but Spring has none of the palliatives. Every emotional nerve is close to the surface. Every sound and sight, every touch of the air is a summons to feel, to open your doors, to let life possess you and do what it likes with you.

What did I tell you when you were little girl? The only way we women can get through our lives honorably is with courage and resignation, both. ~168

Love lost by one moment’s explicit unfairness can’t be won back by trying to justify it

Things like this—love-relationships—need a certain minimum of proximity to keep them going.

Beard,” said Patrick, which was their school slang for “I don’t believe you.

cupboard. The strange little key, which had been his great-grandmother’s,

With hands that shook, Omri probed into the depths of the chest till he found the box-within-a-box-within-a-box.

Among the innumerable books on Addy’s shelves was one by Ernest Hemingway in which I found these words: ‘What is moral is what you feel good after. What is immoral is what you feel bad after.

It's funny how, when you really want to say something bitchy and cutting to someone who's been bitchy to you, you can't think of anything till afterwards. When there's no real call for it, you come suddenly out with a piece of 9-carat bitchery that shakes even you.

Spring came late. For the children, shut in the dark, cold parsonage, adjusting to Aunt and getting over the death that brought her, the winter had seemed endless. But now the rough moor was flecked with racing cloud shadows; the maltreated holly tree had stopped weeping; the green mould on the graves had dried to an unsuggestive grey. The church could never look cheerful. It was too black, and its voice, the bell, always said 'Fu - ner -al... fu - ner- al...' even when it was only calling them to hear one of their Papa's dramatic sermons.

When I was your age I met a man older than myself, quite a bit older. I fell in love with him. Really in love. I know people say it’s just puppy love at that age, but I was in love properly. It lasted for years. It was the most powerful feeling I can ever remember. At that age one has no defenses. It just overwhelmed me.

It seems to me those are just the ones who have to do without, because, in the final analysis, they can. And men basically want women who can’t live without them.

If the ending is messy, one doesn’t remember anything good about any of it.

Even to be impaled by a happy fate makes you jerk against the knowledge of inevitability, of final commitment.

FACT The Native Americans invented the game lacrosse.

soldiers

Oh she's alright it's just that - I don't want to get mixed up with anyone in the house. I don't want to get mixed up at all with anybody anymore.

You touch, I kill.

I’m no connoisseur of wines, but I know what’s bad.

Charlie had been doing something to the hedge; it was not exactly trimmed, but its disorder was now angular instead of bunchy.

I put my chin up and tried to stiffen my upper lip, but found I didn't seem to have any muscles in it.

Little Bear,

Inside was a small white metal cupboard with a mirror in the door, the kind you see over the basin in old-fashioned bathrooms.

Omri and Patrick had spent many hours together playing with their joint collections of plastic toys.

Now he closed his eyes and unwished the test pass and wished instead that this little twisty key would turn Gillon’s present into a secret cupboard.

He stood pressed against the inside wall of the cupboard, clutching his knife, rigid with terror, but defiant.

You touch—I kill!” the Indian growled ferociously.

Funny to think that he would certainly have done it, only a week ago, without thinking about the dangers.

shoulder.

outa

incredulously.

here!

soap

cut

flummoxed.

Little Bear looked at him steadily and nodded. Omri opened the flap and Indian and horse stepped out into the morning sunlight.

Omri refused to get involved in an argument. He was somehow scared that if he talked about the Indian, something bad would happen. In fact, as the day went on and he longed more and more to get home, he began to feel certain that the whole incredible happening—well, not that it hadn’t happened, but that something would go wrong. All his thoughts, all his dreams were centered on the miraculous, endless possibilities opened up by a real, live, miniature Indian of his very own. It would be too terrible if the whole thing turned out to be some sort of mistake.

Work, that supposed panacea, the great Taker-of-Your-Mind-Off, proved just about as totally useless and in fact irrelevant as those ‘Easy Childbirth’ theories are in the face of the real thing.

There’s nothing, of course, more damaging and hurtful to the psyche than that—searching grimly for things to despise and revile in a person you once loved. You may destroy the beloved image but at the same time you destroy part of the basis of your self-respect, plus a whole vital chunk out of your past. Because, if he is hateful now, what aberration once caused you to waste so much love on him?

That’s my whole trouble. I don’t seem capable of living for the moment. It’s as if the future threw back a shadow—a great black shadow of years of loneliness, and it terrifies me so much that I keep lighting little futile lights to try to drive the shadow away.

I know what is wrong. You havn't decided what you want.' She'd underlined this many times. 'Terribly important to draw up a balance sheet every now and then, debits and credits. Decide what's important, what's worth fighting for. Don't drift, ever. Decide then act. If you fail well at least you tried. Don't know what you want so can't advise you how to get it.

When you’ve loved somebody for a long time, and then it stops, it’s akin to an amputation in that you go on feeling the cut-off part long after it’s been taken away. All sorts of nervous and emotional impulses set out to travel to their accustomed stations, and when they come up against the new, raw barrier, they’re carried through it by their own impetus, and only then, finding themselves shooting through empty space, do they dwindle and die away.

He was just under three inches tall. His blue-black hair, done in a plait and pressed to his head by a colored headband, gleamed in the sun. So did the minuscule muscles of his tiny naked torso, and the skin of his arms. His legs were covered with buckskin leggings, which had some decoration on them too small to see properly. He wore a kind of bandolier across his chest and his belt seemed to be made of several strands of some shiny white beads. Best of all, somehow, were his moccasins.

After that, of course, though he recovered later, nobody was about to believe any tales he had to tell about little live men.

If’n Ya Wanna Go Back

Omri entered the house by the side door, which opened into the kitchen. His black and white cat, Kitsa, was sitting on the drainboard. She watched him out of her knowing green eyes as he came to get a drink of water. “You’re not supposed to be up there, Kits,” he said, “you know that.” She continued to stare at him. He flicked some water on her but she ignored it. He laughed and stroked her head. He was crazy about her. He loved her independence and disobedience. He helped himself to a hunk of bread, butter and Primula cheese, and walked through into the breakfast room. It was their every-meal room, actually. Omri sat down and opened the paper to the cartoon. Kitsa came in, and jumped, not onto his knee but onto the table, where she lay down on the newspaper right over the bit he was looking at. She was always doing this—she couldn’t bear to see people reading.

prized

Hell,

It was a wild and terrible cry, not the sort of cry we ever hear in the world now, but something from the far past, before there were any men on the earth, when the weird and fearful creatures had it all to themselves.

There

vomited over

off, his head being pounded, and his ankle kicked, sharp as a dog bite,

Ax? Dent? Enemy dent head with tomahawk?

I learned that 'confession' doesn't ease the soul, but challenges it

But there are, I was learning, different landscapes in the country of love.

I know what is wrong. You havn't decided what you want.' She'd underlined this many times. 'Terribly important to draw up a balance sheet every now and then, debits and credits. Decide what's important, what's worth fighting for. Don't drift, ever. Decide then act. If you fail well at least you tried. Don't know what you want so can't advise you how to get it. ― Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room

I know what is wrong. You haven't decided what you want. She'd underlined this many times. Terribly important to draw up a balance sheet every now and then, debits and credits. Decide what's important, what's worth fighting for. Don't drift, ever. Decide then act. If you fail well at least you tried. ― Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room

I know what is wrong. You haven't decided what you want. She'd underlined this many times. Terribly important to draw up a balance sheet every now and then, debits and credits. Decide what's important, what's worth fighting for. Don't drift, ever. Decide then act. If you fail well at least you tried. Don't know what you want so can't advise you how to get it.

I know what is wrong. You haven't decided what you want. She'd underlined this many times. Terribly important to draw up a balance sheet every now and then, debits and credits. Decide what's important, what's worth fighting for. Don't drift, ever. Decide then act. If you fail well at least you tried.

What does that mean, historic regions? Is it older than unhistoric regions?" asked Roger

other brave get …” He gave Boone’s head a sharp, possessive pat and straightened up. “Dance finish. You take dead braves, plasstic. Put in ground.” “Little Bear, I can’t now. I must go with Emma. Did—did you see her? She—she saw you. I have to make sure she—helps, and doesn’t tell.

His mother had often talked about the way certain books called you when you were really engrossed in them and to put them down.

coming

had had

Indian and everything else, away. So Omri had had to keep it secret, and

caught in an elevator. In pride of place were two large photographs of Iroquois chieftains that he’d found in magazines. Neither of these Indians looked remotely like Little Bear, but they appealed to Omri