Among Others Quotes
"We always wound up the car windows as tight as tight when we had to pass it, and tried to hold our breath."
"My sister and I called it Mordor, and we’d never been there on our own before."
"Surely it is a device of the Enemy," I murmured.
"Their world is real," I protested. "Just in a different way. At a different angle."
"It’s a bit crushed," she said, fishing it out.
"I’m telling that part first because it’s compact and concise and it makes sense."
"I have to keep fighting to stop making myself sound more normal."
"Think of it as one of those memoirs that’s later discredited to everyone’s horror."
"And how nice it’ll be for you," they said, "to be in the countryside."
"Arlinghurst is one of the best girls’ schools in the country," one of them said.
"I want to run so much sometimes my body aches with longing more than the pain from my leg."
"The food was, as I’d expected, terrible—leathery meat and watery potatoes."
"I’d have liked to sit down, but I wasn’t going to say so."
"I can stand up much better now. I will get better, whatever the doctors said."
"I will laugh about this one day, I told myself."
"I managed to say thank you as well as goodbye."
"I watched him out of the front door and saw him lighting a cigarette."
"It turns out to be a joke about the countryside."
"We spent our childhood playing in the ruins."
"You can borrow any books you want, just take care of them and bring them back," he said.
"I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can’t imagine them properly now."
"If I were omnipotent and omniscient I think I could have come up with a better one."
"I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day."
"It’s not that I don’t believe in God, it’s just that I haven’t felt very inclined to get down and worship someone who wants me to think 'no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.'"
"How can you compare anything to [The Lord of the Rings]? I can’t believe Stephen Donaldson’s hubris."
"I remember finishing The Hobbit and handing it to Mor and saying 'Read it. It’s pretty good. Isn’t there another one of these around here somewhere?'"
"Sometimes I’m not sure whether I’m entirely human."
"Sometimes it feels as if it’s only books that make life worth living."
"I think she felt confined by her life. She was a teacher, and a mother and a grandmother. I think she would have liked more poetry in her life, one way or another."
"I miss Grampar. It’s not that I’d have a lot to talk to him about really, like Sam, it’s just that he’s an essential part of life."
"Fear is the mind killer, fear is the little-death."
"If she can get in, another time she might kill me."
"She couldn’t get through stained glass, for what good that is."
"It’s funny how it’s hard to concentrate on reading in a waiting room."
"It’s better to be like George Orr than have her win."
"Christmas is a time when people ought to be at home."
"Memories are like a big pile of carpets, I keep them piled up in one big pile in my head and don’t pay much attention to them separately."
"Nobody would pretend to be a cripple! Nobody would use a stick they didn't need! You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking that I would."
"If I could walk without it I'd break it in half across your back and run off singing."
"I'd rather it was something fun. I need O Levels at the very least."
"Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time."
"They buy his clothes. They buy his shoes. They buy him glasses and whisky."
"Magic isn’t inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people."
"I want to live. I thought I had to live for both of us, because she can’t live for herself, but I can’t really live for her."
"There's a kind of magic about Sam, not real magic, but he’s very solidly himself."
"I think we should try it. What harm could it do? Morwenna’s a sensible girl, I think."
"But my family were your cousins. They’re talking, different governments have been talking for years about giving some compensation. But how can anyone compensate me for my family?"
"All is not yet lost," which I thought very cheerful.
"It’s a story about hope," I said. "We don’t know what happened at the end of the year."
"I know no other book that is so much like going on a journey."
"If I hadn’t read them, I never would have believed they were the same person."
"They’re not all that human-looking," I said, which was an understatement. "Most of them are kind of gnarly."
"Anything for a weird life," Wim said, quoting Zaphod.
"I won’t be able to come to school and collect you and drive you here and back, not every week. Maybe sometimes."
"If I have to have a book on how to overcome adversity give me Pollyanna over Judy Blume any day."
"Well-spoken is code for middle class, by the way."
"I think he saw them and dreamed them into the elves he wanted."
"Money is freedom, but it isn’t money, it’s that money stands for having a choice."
"I’ll never drown my books or break my staff."
"Eventually I’ll come to death, and die, and I’ll go on through death to new life, or heaven, or whatever unknowable thing is supposed to happen to people when they die."