David Almond > Quotes

“Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in there jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journy of exploration and discovery.”
― David Almond

“I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.”
― David Almond, Jackdaw Summer

“What are you?" I whispered.
He shrugged again.
Something," he said. "Something like you, something like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel." He laughed. "Something like that.”
― David Almond, Skellig

“Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.”
― David Almond, My Name is Mina

“We have each other, and our stories twist and mingle like the twisting currents of a river. We hold each other tight as we spin and lurch across our lives. There are moments of great joy and magic. The most astounding things can lie waiting as each day dawns, as each page turns. ”
― David Almond, Heaven Eyes

“The dead are often known to eat 27 and 53”
― David Almond, Skellig

“Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.”
― David Almond, My Name is Mina

“Sometimes we just have to admit that there are things we can't know. Why is your sister ill? why did my father die?" she held my hand. "Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can't. We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine" - Mina”
― David Almond

“Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else.”
― David Almond, My Name is Mina

“There's light and joy, but there's also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.”
― David Almond, Kit's Wilderness

“This is our world. Aye, there's more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there's all this joy, Kit. There's all this lovely, lovely light.”
― David Almond, Kit's Wilderness

“I have hair that drifts like seaweed when I swim. I have eyes that shine like rock pools. My ears are like scallop shells. The ripples on my skin are like the ripples on the sand when the tide has turned back again. At night I gleam and glow like sea beneath the stars and moon. Thoughts dart and dance inside like little minnows in the shallows. They race and flash like mackerel farther out. My wonderings roll in the deep like sails. Dreams dive each night into the dark like dolphins do and break out happy and free into the morning light. These are the things I know about myself and that I see when I look in the rock pools at myself.”
― David Almond

“Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can’t know. Why is your sister ill? Why did my father die?…Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. we have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.”
― David Almond, Skellig

“Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.”
― David Almond, Kit's Wilderness

“It's so strange: grown-ups trying to become young, young ones trying to grow up and all the time, whatever people want, time moves forward, forward.”
― David Almond

“And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”
― David Almond, My Name is Mina

“When you grow up", I said, "do you ever stop feeling little and weak?"
"No," she says. "There's always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown-up you are.”
― David Almond

“I do think there is evil. But it is very rare. It is as rare as true goodness. And just as true goodness produces rare saints, true evil produces rare monsters. The rest of us are semi-good, semi-bad, and we live our lives in a kind of half-happy, half-sad daze. We might hope that one sunny morning we find ourselves in the presence of a saint. And we must pray that we do not encounter the monster.”
― David Almond, Clay

“She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.”
― David Almond

“Look at the earth and you think it's solid," he said. "But look deeper and you'll see it's riddled with tunnels. A warren. A labyrinth.”
― David Almond, Kit's Wilderness

“Mum has made a little model of Dad - it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do.”
― David Almond, My Name is Mina

“more 27 and 53,'i said. 'Food of the gods,' he said”
― David Almond, Skellig

“Nobody. Mr nobody. Mr bones and mr had enough and mr arthur itis. Now get out and leave me alone.”
― David Almond, Skellig

“We roamed between the angels and the eagles. Bats flickered against the starry sky. Moonlight poured down”
― David Almond, Heaven Eyes

“I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems.”
― David Almond, My Name is Mina

“The season of evil," I echoed. "Protect your soul.”
― David Almond

“We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.
We let the stars shine into us.”
― David Almond, My Name is Mina

“We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.”
― David Almond, My Name is Mina

“I said, 'Do you know what shoulder blades are for?'
She giggled.
'Do you not even know that?' she said.
'Do you?'
'It's a proven fact, common knowledge. They're where your wings were, and where they'll grow again.”
― David Almond

“It happened so long ago I can't even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.”
― David Almond, Counting Stars

“Death is knowing you're about to die,' says Mam. It's seeing the dead and seeing the living all at once. It's wanting not to die and not to live. It's wanting to stay with the last breath when the dead and the living are all around you, and touching you, and whispering, It's all right, Mam. Everything's all right. But there's no way of staying with the last breath. You have to die.”
― David Almond, Counting Stars