Margaret Mahy Quotes

“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren’t there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer!”

“On a recent visit Laura had watched with consternation as the child punished the doll. ‘I’m allowed to do this,’ he said, hitting it less, Laura felt, out of jealousy for the new baby, than because he had been given the chance to be infinitely cruel to something infinitely yielding.”

“Stamp, your name is to be Laura. I’m sharing my name with you. I’m putting my power into you and you must do my work. Don’t listen to anyone but me. You are to be my command laid on my enemy.”

“She was free to be jealous, but somehow not free, at school, to go and sit with him in the way Carol was doing.”

“Somewhere in the flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries.”

“Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sorry had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon.”

“Given the chance to be cruel did you get cruelty out of your system by acting on the chance, or did you invite it in?”

″‘I don’t know what I think about power,’ Sorry said at last. ‘Mostly I want to go unseen. Of course, at home in my own room- that’s different. Outside, well- I’d rather knit the world up than tear it apart.‘”

″‘Barnaby’s dead!’ it said. ‘Barnaby’s dead! I’m going to be very lonely.‘”

″‘There was something funny about him,’ mused her father. ‘One of those- you know- not-to-be-talkedabout- things, and no one did talk about it, so I’ve never found out what it was. I don’t think Dove knew herself. Nothing disgraceful or catching: nothing you’d inherit... just mysterious.‘”

“You are to be my command laid on my enemy. You’ll make a hole in him through which he’ll drip away until he runs dry. As he drips out darkness, we’ll smile together, me outside, you inside. We’ll... we’ll crush him between our smiles.”

“The stamp was a ridiculous object to consider, after such a threatening journey as Laura’s, yet lying in Winter’s palm it became sinister in its own way.”

“When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again.”

“Later, when Barney was in bed, not thinking of great-uncles, dead or alive or even mislaid, not even thinking of the ghost, he felt something strange begin in his mind... a kind of stirring and opening as if some butterfly were struggling out of its chrysalis and trying to unfold crumpled wings.”

“He could not remember his own mother and Claire had come as a wonderful surprise, giving him a hug when he came home from school, asking him about his day, telling him about hers, arranging picnics and unexpected parties and helping him with hard homework.”

″‘If people fainted because of too much thinking I’d scarcely ever be conscious,’ Tabitha began at once. ‘I think and think all the time, and I’ve never fainted-not once.‘”

“Visiting that great-grandmother is too much like visiting some witch who has lost her magic, but kept her nastiness.”

″‘Mother, there is a lion in the meadow.’ The mother said, ‘Nonsense, little boy.‘”

“Mother, there is a big, roaring, yellow, whiskery lion in the meadow!”

“Little boy, you are making up stories again. There is nothing in the meadow but grass and trees. Go into the meadow and see for yourself.”

“The little boy and the big, roaring, yellow, whiskery lion went to play in the other meadow. The dragon stayed where he was and nobody minded.”

“So the lion in the meadow became a house lion and lived in the broom cupboard, and when the little boy had apples, stories and a goodnight hug, the lion had apples, stories and a goodnight hug as well.”

“Mother, I’m scared to go into the meadow, because of the lion which is there.”

″... Do you see this matchbox? Take it out into the meadow and open it. It will be a tiny dragon. The tiny dragon will grow into a big dragon.”

“Suddenly the door opened. In rushed a big, roaring, yellow, whiskery lion. ‘Hide me!’ it said. ‘A dragon is after me!‘”

“That dragon grew too big. There is no lion in the meadow now. There is a DRAGON in the meadow.”

″‘You should have left me alone,’ said the lion. ‘I eat only apples.‘”