"This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do."
— Terry Pratchett (Wintersmith)

"Little princess, lovely as the dawn, well named Aurore."
— Cameron Dokey (Beauty Sleep: A Retelling of "Sleeping Beauty")

"Step follows step,
Hope follows Courage,
Set your face towards danger,
Set your heart on victory."
— Gail Carson Levine (The Two Princesses of Bamarre)

"Drualt took Freya's warm hand,
Her strong hand,
Her sword hand,
And pressed it to his lips,
Pressed it to his heart.
'Come with me,' he said.
'Come with me to battle,
My love. Tarry at my side.
Stay with me
When battle is done.
Tarry at my side.
Laugh with me,
And walk with me
The long, long way.
Tarry with me,
My love, at my side.'"
— Gail Carson Levine (The Two Princesses of Bamarre)

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
— Terry Pratchett (Diggers)

"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
— Terry Pratchett

"Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong."
— Terry Pratchett

"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!'"
— Terry Pratchett (The Color of Magic)

"You can't map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs. "
— Terry Pratchett (The Color of Magic)

"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players,* to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."
— Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. "
— Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

"* Do you know what it feels like to be aware of every star, every blade of grass? Yes. You do. You call it "opening your eyes again." But you do it for a moment. We have done it for eternity. No sleep, no rest, just endless... endless experience, endless awareness. Of everything. All the time. How we envy you, envy you! Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless deeps of space! You have this thing you call... boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song — it went "Twinkle twinkle little star...." What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!"
— Terry Pratchett (A Hat Full of Sky)

"Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten."
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)

"The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you have no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch. If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about "a handsome prince"... was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called handsome? As for "a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long"... well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories don't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told..."
— Terry Pratchett (The Wee Free Men)

"Knowing things is magical, if other people don't know them."
— Terry Pratchett (A Hat Full of Sky)

"The truth isn't easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap and much more difficult to find."
— Terry Pratchett (Sourcery)

"So? He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn't have time to sleep."
— Tamora Pierce (In the Hand of the Goddess)

"Threats are the last resort of a man with no vocabulary!"
— Tamora Pierce (Lady Knight)

"Lord Raoul asked me to tell you that if you get yourself killed, he will never speak to you again."
— Tamora Pierce

"When people say a knight's job is all glory, I laugh and laugh and laugh. Often I can stop laughing before they edge away and talk about soothing drinks."
— Tamora Pierce

"I think it's fair rude to make him a tree and not know what kind he is."
— Tamora Pierce

"You are a bloody-minded savage. I hope you are kidnapped by centaurs."
— Tamora Pierce

"I'm about to commence four years of obeying the cause of a bruiser on a horse. I refuse to put down what might be the last book I see for months."
— Tamora Pierce

"Why do I get the feeling that if you give me a hard time, I'll tell all of our year-mates your family nickname is Meathead?"
— Tamora Pierce

"You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books."
— Arthur Ransome

"Of course it is juggling, theman in motley was saying...YOu know what your problem is, Sir Grenall? You've been seduced by the lure of spectacle. Sure, I could juggle three or four balls and use two hands, and that would be very impressive, but then what would I do after that? Five balls? Three hands? You see how it goes? Now me, I'm an artist, trying to recapture the original purity of the art form. This-the man nodded at the ball he tossing up and down-this is the essence of juggling."
— Gerald Morris (The Lioness and Her Knight)

"There's never any reason to trust someone. If there's a reason, then it's not trust.

-Terence"
— Gerald Morris (The Quest of the Fair Unknown)

"Just going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
— G.K. Chesterton (Alarms and Discursions)

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
— G.K. Chesterton

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark..."
— G.K. Chesterton

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.
"
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle. "
— G.K. Chesterton (The Defendant)

"Do you love me?" he asked.
I fell silent.
"For the rest of it is glitter and noise," he said. "At the heart of it all is love. You make that choice, and you go forward from there."
— Sharon Shinn (Summers at Castle Auburn)

"BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN"
— Arthur Ransome (Swallows and Amazons)

"Who would wave a flag to be rescued if they had a desert island of their own? That was the thing that spoilt Robinson Crusoe. In the end he came home. There never ought to be an end."
— Arthur Ransome

"A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white bone. A story beats with the heart of every person who has every strained ears to listen. On the breath of the storyteller, it soars. Until its images and deeds become so real you can see them in the air, shimmering like oases on the horizon line. A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same."
— Cameron Dokey

"Remember that yours is not the only heart that may be wishing for love."
— Cameron Dokey (Before Midnight: A Retelling of "Cinderella")

"Unhappy memories are persistent. They're specific, and it's the details that refuse to leave us alone. Though a happy memory may stay with you just as long as one that makes you miserable, what you remember softens over time. What you recall is simply that you were happy, not necessarily the individual moments that brought about your joy.

But the memory of something painful does just the opposite. It retains its original shape, all bony fingers and pointy elbows. Every time it returns, you get a quick poke in the eye or jab in the stomach. The memory of being unhappy has the power to hurt us long after the fact. We feel the injury anew each and every time we think of it."
— Cameron Dokey (Belle: A Retelling of "Beauty and the Beast")

"Darkness may cover light, but that is not the same thing as putting it out. Whereas, to overcome darkness, all light need do is to exist."
— Cameron Dokey (Sunlight and Shadow)

"Oswald: "All your life"
Aurore: "What?"
Oswald: "All your life, isn't that what you wanted to know? How long I loved you?"
Aurore: "Well, yes, I suppose I did, but that wasn't what I was going to ask just now."
Oswald: "I tell you I've loved you since the day you were born, and you tell me you want to know something else. There's no one quite like you, is there, Aurore?" "
— Cameron Dokey (Beauty Sleep: A Retelling of "Sleeping Beauty")

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
— C.S. Lewis

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don't go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don't try to get there at all. It'll happen when you're not looking for it. And don't talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don't mention it to anyone else unless you find that they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. What's that? How will you know? Oh, you'll know all right. Odd things, they say-even their looks-will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools."
-The Profesor"
— C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)