″‘This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!’ thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. ‘I wonder is that more moth balls?’ she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hands. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. ‘This is very queer,’ she said, and went on a step or two further.”
“You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was...”
“He says the best way out is always through.
And I agree to that, or in so far
As that I can see no way out but through—
Leastways for me — and then they’ll be convinced.”
“I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.”
“If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere change which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper.”
“That truth first came to light a few weeks ago, at a party, with Hannah directly in front of me. An amazing moment when everything seemed to be falling into place.”
“He felt himself trembling without control and he wanted to cry out loudly to stop the runaway horse of his brain. He had to find something! He raged in his mind. I won’t let it go!”
“Today, we’re still loaded down – and, to some extent, embarrassed – by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.”
“To skip any one of the billion acts in Columbus’s chain would have wholly changed his life. I have examined his billion of possible careers, and in only one of them occurs the discovery of America.”
But then J.J. discovers a place where time stands still—at least it used to. Time is leaking from our world into Tir na n’Og, But then J.J. discovers a place where time stands still—at least it used to. Time is leaking from our world into Tir na n’Og, the land of the fairies, and while we have too little of it, they are beginning to have too much.
But when the confused and curious boy discovers that a mysterious virus is spreading through town, he decides to enter an otherworldly house to stop it.
“Each time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like fear. Back in bed with her discovery, she stared out the window at the dark leaves of the horse chestnut. ‘Me,’ she murmured. And then, sinking deeper into the quilts, ‘I want…I want to be…wonderful. Oh, Jesus, make me wonderful.’”
“The had unearthed the sensational story of how Atkinson had found a caterpillar in his cabbage; but as it had happened the term before last, they felt that this could hardly be headlined as late news.”
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.”
“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere . . . in the heart of that gray city.”