Ransom Riggs

“For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved.”

“I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover – that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions”

“Por suerte, nos habíamos refugiado en el lugar más perfumado de la isla.”

“Perdone señor, nos preguntábamos cuáles podrían ser sus intenciones, con respecto a comernos.”

“They worried that I spent too much time alone, clinging to the notion that socializing was therapeutic. So was electroshock, I reminded them.”

“Find the bird, find the loop, Yakob vai don't you understand you goddamned stupid yutzi”

“Millard! Who's the prime minister?""Winston Churchill," he said. "Have you gone daft?""What's the capital of Burma?""Lord, I've no idea. Rangoon?""Good! When's your birthday?""Will you quit shouting and let me bleed in peace!”

“Besides, there was the way she beamed at me, smiling with her whole self, and how a coy gesture like tucking her hair back could make me want to follow her, help her, do anything she asked. I was hopelessly outmatched.”

“If I had to shut my eyes it wouldn’t have been any darker. We were like astronauts floating in a starless universe.”

“...when I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After.”

“It's easy to say you don't care about money when you have plenty of it.”

“ ‘You don’t strike me as a quitter.’ ‘Then you don’t know me very well,’ I replied.”

“I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.”

“Everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.”

“I emerged into the sticky-hot evening to find Ricky smoking on the hood of his battered car. Something about his mud-encrusted boots and the way he let smoke curl from his lips and how the sinking sun lit his green hair reminded me of a punk, redneck James Dean. He was all of those things, a bizarre cross-pollination of subcultures possible only in South Florida.”

“Weatherman says," Kev scoffed. "I wouldn't trust that silly bugger to know it's raining now.”

“I did love her, of course, but mostly because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I'd like very much if I met her walking down the street.”

“We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.”

“Fictions, whoppers and paradiddles.”

“If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.”

“I discovered Emerson's soporific qualities by falling asleep with my face in the book, drooling all over an essay called 'Self-Reliance'...”

“Forgive me. I continue to underestimate the breadth of your ignorance.”

“I realized that leaving wouldn't be like I had imagined, like casting off a weight. Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.”

“..what an unchallenging life it would be if we always got things right on the first go.”

“Will you quit shouting and let me bleed in peace!”

“I didn’t know what to call it, what was happening between us, but I liked it. It felt silly and fragile and good.”

“Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.”

“You're right, Dad. Dr. Golan did help me. But that doesn't mean he has to control every aspect of my life. I mean, Jesus, you and mom might as well buy me one of those little bracelets that says, What Would Golan Do? That way I can ask myself before I do anything. Before I take a dump. How would Dr. Golan want me to take this dump? Should I bank it off the side or go straight down the middle? What would be the most psychologically beneficial dump I could take?”

“Right at the flamingo orgy! Left at the multiethnic roof Santas! Straight past the pissing cherubs!”

“I imagine we're killing ourselves right now in al manner of ways that'll seem insane to people in the future.”

“That's quite a performance you gave earlier [...] I'm sure the theater lost a fine actor when you chose to devote yourself to murder and cannibalism.”

“The last act was to infect me with nightmares and paranoid delusions that would take years of therapy and metabolism-wrecking medications to rout out.”

“How many times have I told you? Polite persons do not take supper in the nude.”

“They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn't that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chamges was miracle enough.”

“Sometimes you just need to go through a door.”

“..."I could see tongues of dense fog licking over the ridge in the distance, where this world ended and the next one began, cold, damp, and sunless.”

“She moved to pinch me again but I blocked her hand. I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting.”

“To have endured horrors, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that honorable and brave— that was magical.”

“I don't mean to be rude' I said, 'but what are you people?''We're peculiar,' he replied, sounding a bit puzzled. 'Aren't you?;'I don't know. I don't think so''That's a shame.”

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”

“When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.”

“Oggie sat facing us in a threadbare blazer and pajama bottoms, as if he'd been expecting company--just not pants-worthy company-- . . .”

“I slammed out of the [house] and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.”

“I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn’t know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn’t care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather’s family had been taken from him and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn’t have a dad. And how I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling down house and crying hot stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy year old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom.”

“We were like astronauts floating through a starless universe.”

“Because we weren’t like other people. We were peculiar.”“Peculiar how?”“Oh, all sorts of ways,” he said. “There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.”

“...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.”

“I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.”

“Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.”

“...slow and drunk is no match for fast and scared shitless.”