'They stood still and listened, but all they could hear was the thump-thump of their own hearts. This place was at least as quiet as the quiet Wood between the Worlds. But it was a different kind of quietness. The silence of the Wood had been rich and warm (you could almost hear the trees growing) and full of life: this was a dead, cold, empty silence. You couldn't imagine anything growing in it.'
[Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew]
'Oh dark and magnificent star
What little light I have, take.
Weave those supple fingers into mine.
Feel the flow!'
[The Jesus Incident]
'Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue,
The dream-child moving through a land,
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast-
And half believe it true.'
[Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass]
'Because, after all, the number of people who turn you on is very small, isn't it? Otherwise, we'd be going 'round in a permanent state of repressed sexual dither.'
[This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn]
'Because that's exactly the way life treats you. You struggle with something, get nowhere, want to give up, feel a failure, almost do give up, and then it happens, you get what you want, all of a sudden. And it's such a surprise; you have to learn the lesson afresh every time.'
[This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn]
'We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it us utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that event the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity---so much lower than that of daylight---makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.'
[Watership Down]
'Sometimes I think I'm the best person I know, and then I meet someone who really is the best person I know and I feel like I need a good bath.'
[This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn]
'I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill. "Yes, sir, a clown.... There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off." "You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem. "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them." "Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.'
[To Kill A Mockingbird]
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