Nancy Springer > Quotes

“Conform, go crazy, or become an artist.”
― Nancy Springer

“Confound my genteel upbringing! I could not think of any name foul enough to call him.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Left-Handed Lady

“I hope that the kind reader recognises this as a despairing attempt at humour.”
― Nancy Springer

“Yet one could speak truth and still be a villain”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Left-Handed Lady

“All the words I had prepared turned coward and fled my mind like conscripts deserting a battlefield.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline

“To her, everything is beautiful in its own way, and everyone is a friend just waiting for her. And somehow it works for her.”
― Nancy Springer, My Sister's Stalker

“He would expect me to flee from him. Therefore, I would not. I would flee towards him.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Missing Marquess

“what's life without a spice of stupidity”
― Nancy Springer

“And I ought to stop dreaming about it and start doing it. Right now.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Missing Marquess

“The only way for me to be safe and free was to be - be what my name decreed me. Enola. Alone.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Left-Handed Lady

“Three mysteries are grasped by no man: The mistletoe green between earth and sky, The sadness in a maiden’s smile, The runes shaped by the changing moon.”
― Nancy Springer, I Am Morgan le Fay

“If any decent woman's calling consisted of taking her proper place in society (husband and house, plus voice lessons and a piano in the drawing-room), then this particular woman-to-be prefers to remain indecent.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Left-Handed Lady

“the greatest harm I could possibly suffer would be to lose my liberty, to be forced into a conventional life of domestic duties and matrimony.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Left-Handed Lady

“Grinning with delight even as my heart ached—a familiar bittersweet feeling, that of enjoying affection from afar—I watched until they all went inside, the cab and the barouche drove away, and it became apparent that the moment of drama was over.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets

“He was just a sixteen-year old boy who had been killed, a kid whose photo had been in the paper, a kid who would mostly be forgotten by the time the newspaper went into the garbage-yet he was the universe, all the dying, all the crying. He was everyone who had ever died young.”
― Nancy Springer, Sky Rider

“My dear sister...

His dear sister.

Those words - how oddly they affected me”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Left-Handed Lady

“To be a man, apparently, was to lack the ability to be a woman”
― Nancy Springer

“in the secret code of flowers, a rose of any sort signifies love.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Missing Marquess

“Writing fiction has always, for me, been an alchemy of turning pain into poetry, ugliness into beauty. It has been a kind of redemption.”
― Nancy Springer, The Oddling Prince

“Stop it,' he whispered. Hid lidded eyes winced. His hands faltered up to cover his face.
Dusty did not stop. 'If I'd known you-if I'd known you when you were alive, I think I would have loved you, too.'
Dusty, please stop.' He could barely speak.
I think I do love you.' Her voice had dropped to a whisper, because it was a truth like a silver sword. 'I think I do. I cry, too.”
― Nancy Springer, Sky Rider

“Nothing last forever except change”
― Nancy Springer, Rowan Hood: Outlaw Girl of Sherwood Forest

“There is method to her madness!”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Gypsy Good-Bye

“To be a man, apparently, was to lack the ability to be a woman.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Left-Handed Lady

“In the blue sky overhead, larks sang like my heart.”
― Nancy Springer

“I think,” he says at last, “that it is a great pity she will not trust in me.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets

“I could not be corseted, either literally or figuratively, into any conventional feminine mould.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan

“When looking to travel incognito, it's safest to travel as a widow. People are always anxious to avoid conversation about death. Widows scare them. And there's no better disguise than fear.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Missing Marquess

“We bastards are not to blame for any of it.”
― Nancy Springer, I Am Mordred

“Curiosity goes hand in hand with intellect, and intellect runs in the family.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan

“I watched him until he disappeared between the forest trees—watched after him almost as if I knew that, through no fault of his own, I would not converse with him again for a long time.”
― Nancy Springer, The Case of the Missing Marquess