Katherine Rundell

“He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.”

“If music can shine, Sophie thought, this music shone... 'It's like eight thousand birds, Charles!'When the music closed, she clapped until the rest of the audience had stopped and until her hands were hot and blotched with red... There was something in the music that felt familiar to Sophie. 'It feels,' she said to Charles, 'like home.”

“Perhaps, she thought, that’s what love does. It’s not there to make you feel special. It’s to make you brave. It was like a ration pack in the desert, she thought, like a box of matches in a dark wood. Love and courage, thought Sophie—two words for the same thing.”

“Stories can start revolutions.”

“Governments can do both great and stupid things.”

“You have been the great green adventure of my life. Without you my days would be unlit.”

“Only weak thinkers do not love the sky.”

“It is difficult to believe extraordinary things.”

“Sometimes it seemed difficult for the adults in Sophie's life to tell between 'carried away' and 'absolutely correct but unbelieved.”

“No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.”

“Let me introduce you. Sophie, this is Miss Eliot, from the National Childcare Agency. Miss Eliot, this is Sophie, from the ocean.”

“I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.”

“It's inhuman to take your books away before you know the end.”

“People say we can't do anything about the way the world is; they say it's set in stone. I say it looks like stone, but it's mostly paint and cardboard.”

“You will never be tougher than you are now. Children are the toughest creatures on the planet. They endure.”