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"I find it just simply takes me right back to those times, and I really can't take it, I don't want to, I mean, why should I face up to it? What good does it do me? I know it happened, and that's it."
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"If you have ever walked in Paris, you will see that Paris will ever walk in your memoires!"

"It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France."

"The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh."

"As I looked down at him, as I saw his yellow hair pressed against my coat, I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from which we'd only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive."

"My memories always clutch my brain to understand the past."

"In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language."

"It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all."

"Memories are like dreams. You remember how you got to the front of the classroom with no clothes on."

".. I thought about him now and then, the things he had taught me about 'being human' and 'relating to others;, but it was always in the distance, as if from another life.. .. The people who might have told me were long forgotten, their phone numbers buried in some packed-away box in the attic."
Explore more quotes by Diana Wynne Jones


"And indeed if you think you're a genius at something, what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere."


"I think one of things is that all fantasy it seems to me works the way your brain basically works. This is perhaps a startling concept, but I think it's true."


"I do feel very strongly that this is one of the things which people need encouragement to sort out, because I have this very strong feeling that everybody is probably a genius at something, it's just a question of finding this."


"I mean one of the things about being alone is that you've no people to define yourself off, I mean, people are like all-round mirrors, because let's face it, we don't often see ourselves all round in a mirror anyway, do we."


"Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about."


"Mainly as sort of blueprints for dealing with most of the adults in their lives, to some extent with their fellows. It is this notion of aiming high and there's always hope, aim low and you might as well stop now."


"This does make me very very careful, particularly in the second draft, to get it right, because you do feel that somebody in the future who may be extremely important for everybody, is going to have me behind them, and this is a responsibility, a huge one."


"This is ridiculous, I mean, wholly ridiculous. It never did any child any harm to have something that was a tiny bit above them anyway, and I claim that anyone who can follow Doctor Who can follow absolutely anything."


"If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine."
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