H.G. Parry > Quotes

“you know when you read a book, sometimes, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been missing something your whole life, and you weren’t even aware, and all at once you’ve found it and are just a little bit more whole?”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“Every supporting character is the protagonist of his own story.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“I thought you said everything in a book has meaning.” “It does! That doesn’t mean it means what you want it to mean!”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“That’s what all laws should do. Impose the restrictions that, if human beings were always moral and rational, they would impose upon themselves.”
― H.G. Parry, A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians

“History is every bit as much of a story as fiction.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“I sometimes think ‘just this once’ is the most dangerous phrase in the English language.”
― H.G. Parry, A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians

“I don’t care what everyone says, damaging books is worse than damaging people. People heal up. Books never do. The marks always show.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“It scares the living daylights out of everybody. Present company excepted, I’m sure.” “I don’t really do living or daylight,” Dorian said. “I’m a Gothic masterpiece.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“Truth, at least complete truth, isn’t held in words. But there would be no truth at all without them. It lies behind them and lurks around them and shines through them, in glimpses of metaphor, and connotation, and story.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“Kind people don't make things happen. They try to prevent bad things from happening, and they fail, and they live in fear of that failure. So do those under their protection”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“There are coincidences in life, not in books. Everything in a book is placed there for a reason. What’s the reason for this one?”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“People weather storms they should never be able to survive and then collapse once they’ve passed, as though the storm itself kept them upright.”
― H.G. Parry, A Radical Act of Free Magic

“She was a half-wild thing of ink an d grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.”
― H.G. Parry, The Magician’s Daughter

“It was just that whenever she had thought of seeing the world, she had never realized what it would be like to have the world see her back”
― H.G. Parry, The Magician’s Daughter

“Something has to be heard to be ignored. He heard me this time, and he ignored me.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“As I recall,” Millie said, “in your book, your secret isn’t revealed until you stab your painting in the heart.” He shrugged. “That’s how all secrets are revealed, in the end. Either someone else betrays us, or we betray ourselves.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“Books don’t hurt people.” “What comes out of them jolly well does.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“Death isn't a habit you develop, you know, like tobacco or whiskey. It only takes once.”
― H.G. Parry, The Magician’s Daughter

“This wasn't like the hardship in books. It wasn't just that characters in books weren't real and Anna and the children were - that part of it was obvious and expected. It was that the hardship in books was written. It had purpose. It was part of a story, and however bleak it looked for the people inside the pages, that only meant there were more pages left before the end - unless it was a tragedy, or something Russian. Even then, things would work out the way they ought. It wasn't true here. Pain was simply pain, and there was nothing to do about it except refuse to let it break you.”
― H.G. Parry, The Magician’s Daughter

“There is not a poem on earth that doesn't make sense to anyone.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“What we see when we look at people is just a bundle of our own interpretations”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“We love Dickens because he tell us stories, and because he tell us that we are all stories. We are. We are more than stories, of course. But we have to start somewhere. And there are many worse places to start than, 'Chapter One: I am Born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that stations will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“And while I’m reading, the new words I’m taking in will connect to others already taken in. That reference to blue is the third this chapter, and it always goes with wealth. That phrase is from the poem earlier. Deeper. That’s a reference to the myth of Orpheus. That’s a pairing of two words that don’t usually go together. Wider. That’s a symbol Dickens employs often. That typifies Said’s writings on Orientalism. Points of light. They make a map, or a pattern, or a constellation. Formless, intricate, infinitely complex, and lovely. And then, at once, they’ll connect. They’ll meet, and explode. Of course. That’s the entire point. That’s how the story works, the way each sentence and metaphor and reference feeds into the other to illuminate something important. That explosion of discovery, of understanding, is the most intoxicating moment there is. Emotional, intellectual, aesthetic. Just for a moment, a perfect moment, a small piece of the world makes perfect sense.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“Where the light was strongest, there were no buildings.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“You could die in the war," she reminded him.
"I know. And I'm scared of that too. But I'd die free, at least, or as free as people like us can ever be."
"Does that matter, really?"
"I don't know," he admitted with a sigh. "But it feels like it should.”
― H.G. Parry, A Radical Act of Free Magic

“They won't do anything here either. They'll listen, and they'll nod, and they'll agree what a shame it is. Some will even say it very loudly and angrily. But they won't act. People are dying, and suffering worse than death--hundreds of thousands of people. I know they weigh on your soul. Words won't save them. Somebody, somewhere, must actually do something, and that must be you.”
― H.G. Parry, A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians

“Are you smiling?"
"It's a serious frown, but I put it on backward."
"Well, straighten it.”
― H.G. Parry, A Radical Act of Free Magic

“That was the trouble with the magic that bespelled the walls of the House of Commoners. It responded to eloquence, not truth. Wilberforce had once, a very long time ago, thought the two were interchangeable. Now he knew it was just as easy to be eloquent and wrong as it was to be eloquent and right.”
― H.G. Parry, A Radical Act of Free Magic

“She had tried when she turned sixteen to think of herself as a woman, like Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet or the multitudes of heroines who lived in her books, but in her head she wasn't there. They were all older than her, and had all, even Jane, seen more of life. And yet she was too old to be Sara Crewe or Alice or Wendy Darling either. She was a liminal person, trapped between a world she'd grown out of and another that wouldn't let her in. It was one reason why she wanted to leave the island so badly--- the hope that leaving the place she'd grown up would help her leave her childhood behind. Not forever, not yet. But for a visit, to see what it was like.”
― H.G. Parry, The Magician’s Daughter

“Let me try to warn you again. Knowledge is dangerous”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep