A biography for Ransom Riggshasn’t been written yet.
“I've always been interested in exploration and the history of exploring the world, but it seems like we've found everything now.”
“I'd always wanted to write a novel, but after attending film school, I'd spent five years knocking on Hollywood's door and had put that idea aside.”
“Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.”
“The day that lay before (was) full of infinite possibilities, though in a million superficial ways it was identical to the day before.”
“It seemed like my parents were always trying to get me to care about money, but I didn’t, really. Then again, it's easy to say you don't care about money when you have plenty of it.”
“I'll never understand ninety-nine percent of humanity. - Enoch”
“I fell in love with London and one particular era in London.”
“Which was just well: goodbyes had never been my strong suit anyway, and lately my life had felt like an unbroken series of them. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”
“A song and a smile from someone I cared about could be enough to distract me from all that darkness, if only for a little while.”
“I grew up in Florida, which is the land of flea markets and swap meets. My grandmother loved to go these places, and she'd take me along.”
“You have your world to rebuild, and I have mine.”
“Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.”
“John Bellairs's young adult mysteries were great - and super creepy.”
“I was quite possibly in the midst of losing my mind. I needed to get away from people until I figured out if I actually was losing my mind.”
“Woodcuts have a really timeless sort of feel, and they feel like a book that's a couple hundred years old.”
“I was in the same class of 100 kids from grade 6 through 12, many of whom I still call friends.”
“I loved the idea of a book of fairytales meant especially for peculiar children, and I love even more the idea of making that fictional book real.”
“..he had trampled her poor, pining heart, and the wound was still raw, even these many years later.”
“If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.”
“When I was a kid, Granpa Portman's fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and to have your life made unrecognised by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be - THAT was magical.”