The Stolen Child Quotes
"Don’t call me a fairy. We don’t like to be called fairies anymore."
"If you must give me a name, call me hobgoblin."
"Or better yet, I am a changeling—a word that describes within its own name what we are bound and intended to do."
"We kidnap a human child and replace him or her with one of our own."
"Preparation is tedious, involving close surveillance of the child, and of his friends and family."
"No matter how old or young, the object is to deceive the parents into thinking that this changeling is actually their child."
"The difficulty lies not in assuming a child’s history but in the painful physical act of the change itself."
"Thirty years ago, in 1949, I was a changeling who became a human again."
"My first task was to create the fiction that I was the real Henry Day."
"The entire process occurs without a gram of painkiller."
"I stretched out like a stick between the crisp sheets and pondered my good fortune."
"Memory, which so confounds our waking life with anticipation and regret, may well be our one true earthly consolation when time slips out of joint."
"The trick of growing up is to remember to grow."
"Life became orderly, and the discipline a joy."
"The music seized me like a river current, pushing my conscious self deeper into my core."
"By phrasing the matter with a ruthlessly precise logic, one can play—or say—anything."
"I suspect he felt at odds with my passion for music."
"The trick involves getting people to listen to the weak beats and seemingly insignificant silences between notes."
"Happy in that we are not over-happy. On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button."
"But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end."
"I’ve been taking lessons for the past few years. It makes it easier to understand the music beneath it all."
"I’m not Henry Day at all, but a hobgoblin that lived in the woods for a long, long time."
"In the shade of new leaves, we put him in the ground."
"Behind her black veil, my mother did not weep."
"The house felt more cool and quiet than it did in the dead of night."
"The guests produced a murmur that rose and fell consistent as the ocean."
"A quick sideways glance and an even briefer smile."
"There’s so much I want to do. Help those in need. See the world. Fall in love."
"I hope you get what you want, Tess, and don’t get what you don’t."
"We watched crows gather in the treetops before evening fell."
"You might have to stay home for a while. Just until I can get on my feet."
"A family doesn’t beat up one of its own, even if they have a good reason."
"Life here has its compensations. You will never get old."
"The relentless thinking machine. The incessant demands of tomorrow and the yesterdays piled up like a heap of corpses."
"The insufferable impudence of today’s youth."
"With practice and concentration over the years, I was now able to decipher their speech."
"Had the capture not been explained beforehand, I would have thought they were killing him."
"The mournful bays of the bloodhounds echoing through the hills, drawing nearer and nearer."
"True art is less about all the wanting-to-be bullshit, and more about practice. Just play the music, baby."
"Dreams are, Henry, and you cannot will them away, any more than you can call them into being."
"Isn’t that adorable? Look at how lifelike they made the baby."
"I’d like to get out of this gray city and see the countryside. Go hiking, sleep under the stars."
"I’m looking for my father, Gustav Ungerland."
"Unless you have the right papers, you don’t."
"They wanted to leave, and it was only a matter of time."
"East of the creekbed, there was an old chestnut, cracked and dying from the bottom up."
"I didn’t notice them before, but up he scooted, like climbing a ladder."
"I could picture the faeries running in from all directions and stopping before me, the sentinel at the tree."
"As if the honeymoon had finally commenced, when we made love that night, our tiny room became a cozy paradise."
"Music took me part of the way, but the final step is the truth."
"I went back for my book. Our encounter outside the library spooked me."
"I planned my words, how I would forgive him, present his stolen music, give him my name, and bid him farewell."
"He kept coming. Henry said he was sorry for what he was about to do and lifted the lantern above my head, so I ran right past him."
"The stars had come out and the crickets were fiddling madly. My clothing smelled of soot."
"In the predawn gloom, I went back and memorized the layout of the building, figuring out step by step what I was going to do."
"The music carried us in two directions, as if above and below; and in the interludes, the spaces between the notes, I thought he, too, was trying to say goodbye, goodbye to the double life."
"Our kind are few, and no longer deemed necessary. Far greater troubles exist for children in the modern world."
"I am gone and am not coming back, but I remember everything."