Silvia > Silvia's Quotes

“And if we know how to light a fire, why do we carry tinder around with us?"

Because you're humans," the little one explained serenly. "You're stupid.”
― Silvana de Mari, The Last Dragon

“The Human was extremely tall. On its head it had yellowish hair coiled like a rope. It had no hair on its face. And yet his grandmother had been very categorical about that. Humans have hair on their faces. Its called a beard. Its one of the many things that distinguish them from elves. The little elf concentrated, trying to remember, then it came to him.

"You must be a female man," he concluded triumphantly.
"The word is woman, fool," said the human.
"Oh, sorry, sorry, woman-fool, I be more careful, I call right name, woman-fool"....”
― Silvana de Mari, The Last Dragon

“Quando uno ha troppa tristezza, la magia ci annega dentro, come le persone dentro l'acqua. Però nonna sapeva come si fa. Se pensi forte le cose, loro diventano vere. Ma, se dentro hai la tristezza, tutto quello che ti esce dalla testa è la tristezza.”
― Silvana De Mari, The Last Dragon

“I hope your bacon burns.”
― Diana Wynne Jones , Howl’s Moving Castle

“Really, these wizards! You'd think no one had ever had a cold before! Well, what is it?" she asked, hobbling through the bedroom door onto the filthy carpet.
"I'm dying of boredom," Howl said pathetically. "Or maybe just dying.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“I've often noticed" Fiona said, "that when people say, 'This can't happen in this day and age', they say it because it is happening.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock

“Doras II was a somewhat absentminded king, It is said, when Death came to summon him, Doras granted Death the usual formal audience and then dismissed him from his presence. Death was too embarrassed to return until many years later- Ka'a Orto'o, Gnomic Utterances”
― Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland

“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“I swear it by earth and water,"said the boy in green.
"I swear it by bronze and iron," his sister said.
"We swear it by ice and fire," they finished it together.
Bran groped for words. Was he supposed to swear something back to them.--
"May your winters be short and your summers bountiful,"he said.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Witches are naturally nosy,” said Miss Tick, standing up. “Well, I must go. I hope we shall meet again. I will give you some free advice, though.”
“Will it cost me anything?”
“What? I just said it was free!” said Miss Tick.
“Yes, but my father said that free advice often turns out to be expensive,” said Tiffany.
Miss Tick sniffed. “You could say this advice is priceless,” she said, “Are you listening?”
“Yes,” said Tiffany.
“Good. Now...if you trust in yourself...”
“Yes?”
“...and believe in your dreams...”
“Yes?”
“...and follow your star...” Miss Tick went on.
“Yes?”
“...you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

“Blessings be on this house," Granny said, perfunctorily. It was always a good opening remark for a witch. It concentrated people's minds on what other things might be on this house.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“...Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was...”
― Terry Pratchett

“Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“If you really want to upset a witch, do her a favor which she has no means of repaying. The unfulfilled obligation will nag at her like a hangnail.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. ("Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")”
― Ray Bradbury, Long After Midnight

“And she would not hold back his limbs when his heart was gone to the woods, for it is ever the way of witches with any two things to care for the more mysterious of the two.”
― Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter

“But witchy magic doesn’t listen to please and pretty please, and anyway, I didn’t really care. I only pretended to care because not caring makes me a monster.”
― Franny Billingsley, Chime

“Witches don’t look like anything. Witches are. Witches do.”
― Franny Billingsley, Chime

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“You see, a witch has to have a familiar, some little animal like a cat or a toad. He helps her somehow. When the witch dies the familiar is suppose to die too, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, if it's absorbed enough magic, it lives on. Maybe this toad found its way south from Salem, from the days when Cotton Mather was hanging witches. Or maybe Lafitte had a Creole girl who called on the Black Man in the pirate-haven of Barataria. The Gulf is full of ghosts and memories, and one of those ghosts might very well be that of a woman with warlock blood who'd come from Europe a long time ago, and died on the new continent.

And possibly her familiar didn't know the way home. There's not much room for magic in America now, but once there was room.

("Before I Wake...")”
― Henry Kuttner, Masters of Horror

“It might have interested Newt to know that, of the thirty-nine thousand women tested with the pin during the centuries of witch-hunting, twenty-nine thousand said “ouch,” nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine didn’t feel anything because of the use of the aforesaid retractable pins, and one witch declared that it had miraculously cleared up the arthritis in her leg.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“Something soft turn to stone within her. She had no choice. She had to fight. She had to win.

She would learn. And then she'd free them.
Or join them.”
― Amber Argyle, Witch Song

“In her dance, she controlled the bright paper birds with invisible wires and threads. She played the human: heavy, tied to earth. Her dances weren't pretty or delightful, but they were magical, [...] They called her a dancer and a puppeteer and an artist. They might have called her a witch, and not the good kind either.”
― Katherine Catmull, Summer and Bird

“That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone?”
― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith