Jonathan Stroud quotes - page 3

Remember this." he said in a soft voice. "Demons are very wicked. They will hurt you if they can. Do you understand this? (Jonathan Stroud)
I'm Martha. And you are...?" A small snuffle, a smaller voice. "Nathaniel.
Jonathan Stroud
Maybe I'd better call a halt to the journal for a bit. Until something crops up, that is, which it hopefully won't for a couple of decades. In the meantime: farewell, enjoy your futile lives, etc. This is Bartimaeus, care of The Other Place, signing off.
Jonathan Stroud
Then again, Solomon was human. And that meant he was flawed (Go on, take a look at yourself in the mirror. A good long look, if you can bear it. See? Flawed's putting it mildly, isn't it?)
Jonathan Stroud
Me, I was still in the pygmy hippo in a skirt, singing lusty songs about Solomon's private life and a giant stone back and forth through the air as I climbed out of the quarry at the edge of the site.
Jonathan Stroud
The Amulet of Samarkand. It was Simon Lovelace's. Now it is yours. Soon it will be Simon Lovelace's again. Take it and enjoy the consequences.
Jonathan Stroud
That's usually how they start, the young ones. Meaningless waffle.
Jonathan Stroud
Hippo in a skirt: this was a comic reference to one of Solomon's principal wives, the one from Moab. Childish? Yes. But in the days before printing we had limited opportunities for satire.
Jonathan Stroud
Okay...' I hurried on. 'But why me?' 'You're a girl,' Lockwood called. 'Aren't you supposed to be more sensitive?' 'To emotions, yes. To nuances of human behavior. Not necessarily to secret passages in a wall.' 'Oh, it's much the same thing.
Jonathan Stroud
It was one of those moments when a great Don't Care wave hits you, and you float off on it, head back, looking at the sky.
Jonathan Stroud
"Woken up, have you?" the woman said. Her voice was like broken glass in an ice bucket.† † Unexpectedly sharp. And cold. No one can say I don't work hard describing things for you. (Jonathan Stroud)
Perhaps he'd want me to conjure up an illusion. That might be fun: there was bound to be a way of misinterpreting his request and upsetting him†. †One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror.
Jonathan Stroud
I used to have quite long hair, and I decided that I wanted to get it cut. I'd never met the person who did it, and she cut it into some kind of dreadful mullet. It looked like a triangle on my head. The other kids were merciless.
Jonathan Stroud
I like to have my characters talking in an up-to-date way, and I like their essentially modern self-awareness, which means we can have lots of irony and jokes.
Jonathan Stroud
I got fairly good grades, but I was bad at woodwork. They said I tried hard, but the result was hopeless.
Jonathan Stroud
Plan F, we follow Plan F, right now. - Is that the one where we run away? - Not at all. It's the one where we beat a dignified emergency retreat.
Jonathan Stroud
Well, I make that one murder victim, one police interrogation and one conversation with a ghost,” George said. "Now that's what I call a busy evening.” Lockwood nodded. "To think some people just watch television.
Jonathan Stroud
I wasn't pretty, but as my mother once said, prettiness wasn't my profession.
Jonathan Stroud
Making tea is a ritual that stops the world from falling in on you.
Jonathan Stroud
The old pain had started up again, throbbing in my chest, stomach, bones. It wasn't healthy to be encased in a body for so long. How humans can stand it without going completely mad, I'll never know.† † Then again... maybe that explains a lot.
Jonathan Stroud
Really?" "No. I'm being ironic. Or is it sarcastic? I can never remember." "Irony's cleverer, so you're probably being sarcastic. (Jonathan Stroud)
But Iget afraid. It's just that fear makes me sort of... angry and resentful, and I bite back at it. It's hard to describe." It isn't hard to describe, you idiot," Aud said. "It's called courage.
Jonathan Stroud
As part of my current charge I have been instructed to provide an occasional journal of my recent activities*. * I avoid the term blog, since coincidentally this word is also the name of a repulsive sub-caste of foliots, characterised by ooze, fleshy folds and gills of blue-grey gristle. Think slugs, but with worse personalities.
Jonathan Stroud
Today summoned painfully to earth by a short fat English magician with a dangerous stammer*. *Dangerous because any verbal hiccup while giving me my orders would break my bonds and uncage my savage wrath. Ooh, gave myself a bit of a shiver writing that. That's literary talent.
Jonathan Stroud
No magical alarm sounded, though I did hit my head five times on a pebble†. †Once each on five different pebbles. Not the same pebble five times. Just want to make that clear. Sometimes you human beings are so dense.
Jonathan Stroud