“He felt an offense against what his mother called his instinct for rightness. It wasn’t that Reverend Mother lied to him. She obviously believed what she said. It was something deeper, something tied to his terrible purpose.”
″(Lucy) had once known them better than the stars of our own world, because as a Queen in Narnia she had gone to bed much later than as a child in England.”
“Raw meat is not a nice thing to fill one’s pockets with, but they folded it up in fresh leaves and made the best of it. They were all experienced enough to know that they would feel quite differently about these squashy and unpleasant parcels when they had walked long enough to be really hungry.”
“Dream big, they say. Shoot for the stars. Then they lock us away for 12 years and tell us where to sit, when to pee, and what to think. […] Then we turn 18 and even though we’ve never had an original thought, we have to make the most important decision of our lives. […] And if you don’t have the money and don’t really have the grades, a lot of the decision gets made for you.”
“The Winter of the Dog is a winter Joel will never forget. It’s then that he begins to understand that he’s himself, and nobody else. But he grows up, he grows older, he becomes thirteen.”
In England, John Spencer’s parents are dead, and his uncle sends him off to the Royal Navy as a “Gentleman Volunteer” on a ship, the HMS Sentinel, on anti-slavery patrol.