“I haven't been so sure of anything since the time Mum asked me if I absolutely, definitely, certainly thought it was a good idea to practise doing cartwheels inside the house.”

“I've had quite enough danger for a while I think. I might have some more when I'm thirteen, but definitely not before then...”

“...we've already had one horrible thing happen today, which means that if you think about it the odds of anything else horrible happening again in the next few hours should now be quite low.”

“I had an aunt named 'abnormal Shauna' once. But she passed away in an unfortunate cliff-top interpretative dance and fireworks accident.”

“...food was at least three million per cent more delicious when you ate it immediately after thinking you were going to die.”

“We're going to have ourselves one hell of a Ruckus," said Smokey with a grin that went quite beyond the boundaries of mischief and right into the realm of delinquency.”

“I don’t think I’m an exceptionally bad reader. I suspect that many people, maybe even most, are like me. We read and read and read, and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michel de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them,” he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.” He goes on to explain how “to compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory,” he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of what the tome was about and what he thought of it.  ”