Well Witched Quotes

“We always find it difficult to forgive our heroes for being human.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“Making a wish is like saying, 'I can't deal with anything, I give up, somebody bigger come along and solve it all instead.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“She had big, vague eyes and a big, vague smile, and was always very busy in the way that a moth crashing about in a lampshade is busy.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“Which of your victims are you being interviewed about today, anyway?"

Jonathan, don't call my subjects victims.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“People's personalities took up space, he sometimes thought. When they were trapped in a house or a job or a school together, they rubbed up against each other, squeaked like balloons, and made sparks. Ryan's parents both had large, gleaming, hot-air-balloon personalities. Sometimes it was hard to fit them into the same house, and Ryan had learned the art of suddenly making himself take up less space, demand less, so that his parents were not chafing against each other as much.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“Suddenly he remembered Josh sitting on the motorbike and chatting with the bikers outside the pub—and he felt a throb of jealousy. It wasn't that he harbored any desire to sit on a motorbike, but...he wanted to be allowed to want to sit on a motorbike.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“It had shown him that if you looked at things from a new angle, they could suddenly become unfamiliar and scary. It became important to see things in as many different ways as possible, so they couldn’t catch you by surprise.”
― Frances Hardinge, Verdigris Deep

“Josh never said sorry, never said thank you, but he wrote to Ryan and Chelle every week with a conscientiousness and dedication he had never shown in anything else. The letters were bitter and funny and there were holes of unsaid where you could feel the demons breathing.”
― Frances Hardinge, Verdigris Deep

“The water had got into the seams and joints of the world and washed away the glue. Lives and little universes broke their banks, mingling and bubbling over and flowing out to join the river. Plastic tricycles with peeling sticker eyes, photograph albums, Bic pens, dish brushes, barrettes, uprooted tomato plants. Comics spun giddily, socks sulked against windowsills.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“Ryan could feel himself using his words to sculpt the storm clouds of the suspicions he had started to form in the library, giving them shape at long last. He looked down at his hands, tensed to wrestle his unruly thoughts into place.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“And in any case, he felt the strangest sense that this place was his. The sun had been waiting and keeping it warm for him.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“He felt worse than naked in front of them, as if something had torn out his middle and left him a ridiculous doughnut boy that everyone could look right through.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“He felt worse than naked in front of them, as if something had torn out his middke and left him a ridiculous doughnut boy that everyone could look right through.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“It was as if somebody had found a gentle, dignified old lady whose friends were all dead and forced her to wear a funny hat.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“...and at first I assumed it was the radio but it turned out to be me talking and I still don't know what I was talking about.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“...and it's tricky because she always makes me feel like, well, you know what it's like, when somebody's watching you and you feel it like dead leaves down the back of your sweater...”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched

“Josh was the only person Ryan had ever told about the way this picture had frightened him. It had shown him that if you looked at things from a new angle they could suddenly become unfamiliar and scary. It became important to see things in as many different ways as possible, so they couldn't catch you by surprise.”
― Frances Hardinge, Well Witched