Explore Book Quotes

″‘Everything is uglier up close,’ she said.”

“The Khalifas lived in the downstairs part of a small concrete house with pink walls, lime-green windows and blue painted balconies with squiggly metal railings, all of which make it look (in Haroun’s view) more like a cake than a building.”

″‘If you could do anything in the world this afternoon, what would you do?’ enquired Uncle Parker, his eyes still closed... ‘Be immortal,’ said Jack promptly. ‘Bit pointless,’ observed Uncle Parker.”

“When you ask people in town what happened to Andie Bell, they’ll tell you without hesitation: ‘She was murdered by Salil Singh.’ No ‘allegedly,’ no ‘might have,’ no ‘probably,’ no ‘most likely.’ He did it, they say. Sal Singh killed Andie. But I’m just not so sure.”

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination.

“‘Rabbit’s clever,’ said Pooh thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ said Piglet, ‘Rabbit’s clever.’ ‘And he has Brain.’ ‘Yes,’ said Piglet, ‘Rabbit has Brain.’ There was a long silence. ‘I suppose,’ said Pooh, ‘that that’s why he never understands anything.‘”

“I thought about it, looking at the pictures and then at my grandfather, his face so earnest and open. What reason would he have to lie?”

“Love is a great beautifier.”

Everything he saw from the carriage window, everything in that cold pure air, in the pale light of the sunset, was as fresh, and gay, and strong as he was himself: the roofs of the houses shining in the rays of the setting sun, the sharp outlines of fences and angles of buildings, the figures of passers-by, the carriages that met him now and then, the motionless green of the trees and grass, the fields with evenly drawn furrows of potatoes, and the slanting shadows that fell from the houses, and trees, and bushes, and even from the rows of potatoes—everything was bright like a pretty landscape just finished and freshly varnished.

“The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.”