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has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass.
They had a basket containing smoked sausages, preserved eggs and—because their mother was prudent as well as generous—a large jar of peach preserve that no one in the family liked very much.
“If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.
This was the time, when night wasn’t quite over but day hadn’t quite begun, when thoughts stood out bright and clear and without disguise.
“They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”
“Yes,” lied Granny, whose grasp of geography was slightly worse than her knowledge of subatomic physics.
was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.
it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.
It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.
She’d struck Esk once before—the blow a baby gets to introduce it to the world and give it a rough idea of what to expect from life. But that had been the last time.
They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair.
