David Almond

“Sometimes children must be left alone to be still and silent, and to do.”

“Then what shall I write? I can't just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I'll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.”

“Words are too easy,” he says. He opens his book. “What looks like truth and sounds like truth might be nothing but a dream, nothing but a story I wish had happened.”

“Live an adventure. Live like you’re in a story.”

“If you can imagine doing something, then you can do it.”

“The body is soft, beautiful, vulnerable. It’s easy to threaten it. It’s easy to harm it. It takes next to nothing to cause pain, to draw blood, to break bones. Takes next to nothing to blast a body to bits. It’s much harder to protect it, she says, and much more important.”

“She points at my chest.“And much more interestingly, what’s that?”“Blood,” I say.She gets her camera out.”

“All of us can do what we like.”“No we can’t. You’re stupid if you think so.”

“Well, well,” she murmurs as I back away.She makes a rectangle with her index fingers and thumbs and looks at my skin through it.“You’re right,” she says. “The boy’s a living work of art.”

“I think of him dreaming of being married to Kim and of tractors and harvesters and conferences in nice country hotels while my dreams are filled with war, with snakes, with bloody wounds, disaster and death. I keep feeling blood trickling over my skin.”

“He narrows his eyes.“Is this true?” He sighs. “It is, isn’t it? That’s all I need.”

“This might be heaven!We might be living in heaven right now! And we might be the angels!”

“...maybe one day we all had wings and one day we'll all have wings again." "D'you think the baby had wings?""Oh, I'm sure that one had wings. Just got to take one look at her. Sometimes I think she's never quite left Heaven and never quite made it all the way here to Earth."She smiled, but there were tears in her eyes. "Maybe that's why she has such trouble staying here," she said.”

“Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.”

“The letters make words and words make us.”

“I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.”

“Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.”

“Anyway, in the end, I don't really believe in Heaven at all and i don't believe in perfect angles. I think that this might be the only Heaven there can possibly be, this world we live in now, but we haven't quite realized it yet.”

“Yes. But sad's alright. Sad's just apart of everything”

“Time’s Flying,” said Dad. He Smiled. He pointed to the air. “There it is, flying past! Catch it!” And he jumped, and caught Time in his hands, and showed it to Lizzie. She took it from him, and threw it up again.“There it goes,” she called. “Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Time!”

“They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel," she said. "They say they're where your wings will grow again one day.”

“Can love help a person to get better?’ I asked.”

“What is is?’‘I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s true or if it’s a dream.’‘That’s alright. Truth and Dreams are always getting muddled.”

“Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you see what you’re looking at more clearly. Did you know that?”

“I woke up and knew he was gone. Straightaway I knew he was gone. When you love somebody you know these things.”

“Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.”

“We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.”

“When you grow up", I said, "do you ever stop feeling little and weak?""No," she says. "There's always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown-up you are.”

“We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.We let the stars shine into us.”

“And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”

“I said, 'Do you know what shoulder blades are for?'She giggled.'Do you not even know that?' she said.'Do you?''It's a proven fact, common knowledge. They're where your wings were, and where they'll grow again.”

“Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.”

“Look at the earth and you think it's solid," he said. "But look deeper and you'll see it's riddled with tunnels. A warren. A labyrinth.”

“Mum has made a little model of Dad - it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do.”

“Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else.”

“Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can’t know. Why is your sister ill? Why did my father die?…Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. we have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.”

“We roamed between the angels and the eagles. Bats flickered against the starry sky. Moonlight poured down”

“It happened so long ago I can't even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.”

“Death is knowing you're about to die,' says Mam. It's seeing the dead and seeing the living all at once. It's wanting not to die and not to live. It's wanting to stay with the last breath when the dead and the living are all around you, and touching you, and whispering, It's all right, Mam. Everything's all right. But there's no way of staying with the last breath. You have to die.”

“I sit in my treeI sing like the birdsMy beak is my penMy songs are my poems.”

“I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.”

“Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.”

“I have hair that drifts like seaweed when I swim. I have eyes that shine like rock pools. My ears are like scallop shells. The ripples on my skin are like the ripples on the sand when the tide has turned back again. At night I gleam and glow like sea beneath the stars and moon. Thoughts dart and dance inside like little minnows in the shallows. They race and flash like mackerel farther out. My wonderings roll in the deep like sails. Dreams dive each night into the dark like dolphins do and break out happy and free into the morning light. These are the things I know about myself and that I see when I look in the rock pools at myself.”

“There's light and joy, but there's also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.”

“The season of evil," I echoed. "Protect your soul.”

“Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.”

“She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.”

“more 27 and 53,'i said. 'Food of the gods,' he said”

“This is our world. Aye, there's more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there's all this joy, Kit. There's all this lovely, lovely light.”

“We have each other, and our stories twist and mingle like the twisting currents of a river. We hold each other tight as we spin and lurch across our lives. There are moments of great joy and magic. The most astounding things can lie waiting as each day dawns, as each page turns.”