Celia Rees
Celia Rees (born 1949) is an English author of children's, YA and Adult fiction.
She was born in 1949 in Solihull, West Midlands but now lives in Leamington Spa with her husband. Rees attended University of Warwick and earned a degree in History of Politics. After university, she taught English in Coventry secondary schools for seventeen years, during which time she began to write.
Since then, she has written over twenty YA titles. Her books have been translated into 28 languages. She has been short listed for the Guardian, Whitbread (now Costa) and W.H. Smith Children’s Book Awards. She is a regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation. She has been Chair of the Children’s Writers and Illustrators Group and on the Society of Authors’ Management Committee.
Her first book for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, was published by HarperCollins in July, 2020.
“Artists often collect. Sometimes compulsively. They hang on to things. They don’t want to let go. Like paintings. I don’t want to part with them. Some I won’t sell at any price. I don’t even let people see ‘em. - We don’t like change, and we’re possesive. Maybe that’s why we do it. We want to hang on to things, hang on to the one time. We don’t want to let it go; we want to capture it and keep it forever. Or one person. How she was then. At that moment. That’s what I want - to stop time, to have that power.”
“I looked into her eyes, and saw my own staring back, the same peculiar shade, pale grey, flecked with yellow, rimmed with black. Now I knew the nature of her debt. It had weighed on her conscience for fourteen years. I was looking into the eyes of mother and I knew that I would never see her again.”
“don't fear tomorrow, 'til today's done with you.”
“There are patterns in everything, in the whole of Nature, from the way the stars turn in the heavens to the whorl of a shell or the petals of a flower and the way leaves arrange themselves about a twig. There are forces, hidden forces. If I can discover what they are, how they operate, I will have my hands upon the levers of creation and can work them myself.”
“Daughter of the Erl King and the Elfen Queen, that's who you are.”
“Colored lights shone right across the northern sky, leaping and flaring, spreading in rainbow hues from horizon to zenith: blood red to rose pink, saffron yellow to delicate primrose, pale green, aquamarine to darkest indigo. Great veils of color swathed the heavens, rising and falling as light seen through cascading curtains of water. Streamers shot out in great shifting beams as if God had put his thumb across the sun.”
“Those that can heal can harm; those that can cure can kill.”
“It is no good wishing for what was not to be.”
“Lies are not rooted in the mind in the way truth is.”
“In the town live witches nine: three in worsted, three in rags, and three in velvet fine...”
“Don't fear tomorrow, till today's done with you.”
“Legend gathered around him, swirling around him like a great black cloak.”
“Tenho uma doença que está além do alcance da medicina; mesmo meu bom amigo Graham não tem cura para ela. Assim que eu chegar em terra, vou querer partir de novo. Meu lar é o navio. Minha pátria é o mar.”