“After all, history is a type of fantasy. For all the primary source research, in the end, the past world the historian builds is as weird and remote from our own as Middle Earth or Narnia, yet oddly familiar.”

“You know that if ever the Fyrdraaca family is in true trouble, Barbizon is supposed to come to life and to our rescue, just as she did for Azucar.''Ayah, Poppy, I've heard the story.''Well, I often consider that I've sat here many times, and often felt in true trouble, and yet Barbizon has never leaped to my aid. So you know what that makes me think?''That it's just a story?''No, no. That my trouble is never true trouble. And things, though I think them bad, are not really so.”

“Most courage comes from being too tired and hungry to be afraid anymore.”

“So when Fyrdraacas turn fourteen and celebrate their Catorcena, and are then adults in the eyes of the Warlord, off we go to Benica Barracks to learn to march, to learn to ride, to learn to shoot, to learn to die. But I do not want to go to the Barracks and learn to be a killer, a servant, a slave.”

“People keep asking "Jacob or Edward?" when the really important question is "Diamond Dave or Sammy?”

“Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own “real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.”

“The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. I would myself, like a shot. For in the end it is Middle-earth and its dwellers that we love, not Tolkien’s considerable gifts in showing it to us. I said once that the world he charts was there long before him, and I still believe it. He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day’s madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.”