Geraldine McCaughrean > Quotes

“I hate clowns. You can't see what they're thinking.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, Peter Pan in Scarlet

“[Peter Pan] has never broken his terrible habit of eavesdropping. So, maybe that wasn't the rustle of pages you heard while this story lasted, but Peter Pan himself, listening in. In exchanged for a story of yours, he might show you his most prized possession: James Hooks' map of Neverland.

In exchange for a smile, he may show you Neverland itself.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, Peter Pan in Scarlet

“It's true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive -- someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reaon. Just loves you. Even just shows an interest. Even someone who doesn't exist, or isn't yours. No, no! They don't even have to love you! They just have to be there to love! Target for your arrows. Magnetic Pole to drag on your compass needle and stop it spinning and tell you where you're heading and...Someone to soak up all the yearning. That's what I think.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean

“If you want to please me very much, you will fall down when I shoot you," -Oates
The White Darkness”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“He is everything, everything, everything I ever admired and wanted and couldn't have. He is everything I needed and couldn't find in real life. Of course he is. That's why I invented him.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“For some crime committed by my ancestors in the dark and forgotten days, I came into the world already tarred and feathered. With shyness. It hurts terribly -- every bit as much as hot tar choking every pore -- and I wish I could be rid of it. But it hurts a lot less than having someone try and peel the shyness off. That's like being flayed alive.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“There are things roaming around inside my head as clever as Theseus in the Labyrinth. It's just that nobody ever gave them the necessary piece of string, so they'll never find their way out.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“Don't struggle too hard to understand people, Sym. They're hideously complicated. Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“It’s true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive — someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reason. Just loves you. Even just shows an interest. Even someone who doesn’t exist, or isn’t yours. No, no! They don’t even have to love you! They just have to be there to love! Target for your arrows. Magnetic Pole to drag on your compass needle and stop it spinning and tell you where you’re heading and…Someone to soak up all the yearning. That’s what I think.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean

“That's how it's done, you see. It's the same way people get horses out of burning buildings. When the whole world's on fire around you, you use a blindfold. Everyone needs someone like Titus for a blindfold. ”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“But I refuse to say. Because I love him, and you'd give anything, wouldn't you? You'd give anything for someone you love not to die alone and in scalding agony?”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“Every crime like this needs someone like me to look away and say nothing.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“Like everything perfect, he set up a ferocious pain inside me -- a flickering, griping sort of pain, because nothing as marvelous as that is ever within reach, is it? Nothing as beautiful can ever last.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“His heart cannoned like a billiard ball off some green wall of his innards.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

“• "Like everything perfect, he set up a ferocious pain inside me -- a flickering, gripping sort of pain, because nothing as marvelous as that is ever within reach, is it? Nothing as beautiful can ever last.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean

“The bookshelves over my bed are full of bookd about the North and South Poles. Ice-bound almost. A glacial cliff-face teetering over my bed. I remember: the night after Dad had been rushed to hospital, one of the shelves sheared off and crashed down on me. I woke up thinking the house was collapsing-books gouging at my head, bouncing off the bed-grame, slapping flat on the floor. I looked at the hole in the wall and the rawlplugs on the pillow and I diidn't know what to do.
About the shelf. About anything.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness

“When Titus speaks, I can hear every word. For me, that's like when the optician slides home the right lens and all the e's and g's and o's and c's become perfectly clear again and it isn't a struggle, even to read the bottom-most line...His voice touches places inside me like someone moving through a house, flicking light switches...No peering into corners for what's been said.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness