E.L. > E.L.'s Quotes

“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"

"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Five Red Herrings

“I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.”
― Francoise Sagan

“I'd like to add some beauty to life," said Anne dreamily. "I don't exactly want to make people KNOW more... though I know that IS the noblest ambition... but I'd love to make them have a pleasanter time because of me... to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn't been born.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

“There was a star danced, and under that was I born.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“Hope is an essential thread in the fabric of all fantasies, an Ariadne's thread to guide us out of the labyrinth ... Human beings have always needed hope, and surely now more than ever.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a piercing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase--nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it.”
― R.J. Anderson, Ultraviolet

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

“Life is worth living as long as there's a laugh in it.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Courage is the resolution to face the unforeseen.”
― Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End

“If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.”
― Terri Windling

“The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ”
― Agatha Christie

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure.

[author's dedication]”
― Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary

“One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood.”
― Agatha Christie

“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
― L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

“Though I have had no adventures, I feel capable of them.”
― Anna Katharine Green, That Affair Next Door

“When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass

“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“Sorry! I don't want any adventures, thank you. Not Today. Good morning! But please come to tea -any time you like! Why not tomorrow? Good bye!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Personal Notebooks Of Thomas Hardy