Children S Authors

"From the blood of Medusa Pegasus sprang. His hoof of heaven Like melody rang."

"Praise with elation, Praise every morning, God's re-creation Of the new day!"

"Morning has broken, Like the first morning, Blackbird has spoken Like the first bird. Praise for the singing! Praise for the morning! Praise for them springing Fresh from the Word!"

"The world never knows, and cannot for the life of it imagine, what this man sees in that maid and that maid in this man. The world cannot think why they fell in love with each other. But they have their reason, their beautiful secret, that never gets told to more than one person; and what they see in each other is what they show to each other; and it is the truth. Only they kept it hidden in their hearts until the time came. And though you and I may never know why this lane is called Shelley's, to us both it will always be the greenest lane in Sussex, because it leads to the special secret I spoke of."

"Women are so strangely constructed that they have in them darkness as well as light, though it be but a little curtain hung across the sun. And love is the hand that takes the curtain down, a stronger hand than fear, which hung it up. For all the ill that is in us comes from fear, and all the good from love."

"Of what use to destroy the children of evil? It is evil itself we must destroy at the roots."

"He loved her, both for her fault and her redemption of it, more than he had ever thought that he could love her; for he had believed that in their kiss love had reached its uttermost. But love has no uttermost, as the stars have no number and the sea no rest."

"'In love there are no penalties and no payments, and what is given is indistinguishable from what is received.' And he bent his head and kissed her long and deeply, and in that kiss neither knew themselves, or even each other, but something beyond all consciousness that was both of them."

"I will fight for you, yes, and you will fight for me. And if you have sacrificed joy and courage and beauty and wisdom for my sake, I will give them all to you again; and yet you must also give them to me, for they are things in which without you I am wanting. But together we can make them."

"No love-story has ever been told twice. I never heard any tale of lovers that did not seem to me as new as the world on its first morning."

"Every man's life (and … every woman's life), awaits the hour of blossoming that makes it immortal … love is a divinity above all accidents, and guards his own with extraordinary obstinacy."

"Romance gathers round an old story like lichen on an old branch. And the story of Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard is so old now — some say a year old, some say even two. How can the children be expected to remember?"

"Once she kissed me with a jest, Once with a tear — O where's the heart was in my breast, And the ring was in my ear?"

"Out upon you, Jerry! Jerry, you're a pity! Jerry, turn about and plant a garden in the City!"

"My harp and I a-wandering Went over Snowdon Mountain, From Anglesey to Swansea Bay It sang like any fountain."

"Bugsby's reach is long as time, His reach is wide as wind is, He can pick you nettles in Greenwich Marsh And docks in the East Indies."

"In Fleet Street, in Fleet Street, the People are so fleet They barely touch the cobble-stones with their nimble feet!"

"The little White Chapel Is ringing its bell With a ring-a-ding-dong, All day long"

"King's Cross! What shall we do? His Purple Robe Is rent in two!"

"Dropt tears have hastened your decay And brought you one step nigher death; And you have heard, unthrilled, unmoved, The music of Love's golden breath And seen the light in eyes that loved. You think you hold the core and kernel Of all the world beneath your crust, Old dial? But when you lie in dust, This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved. Love is eternal."

"Upon your shattered ruins where This vine will flourish still, as rare, As fresh, as fragrant as of old. Love will not crumble."

"Old sundial, you stand here for Time: For Love, the vine that round your base Its tendrils twines, and dares to climb And lay one flower-capped spray in grace Without the asking on your cold Unsmiling and unfrowning face."

"Of troubles know I none, Of pleasures know I many — I rove beneath the sun Without a single penny."

"O evanescent temples built of man To deities he honoured and dethroned! Earth shoots a trail of her eternal vine To crown the head that men have ceased to honour. Beneath the coronal of leaf and lichen The mocking smile upon the lips derides Pan's lost dominion; but the pointed ears Are keen and prick'd with old remember'd sounds. All my breast aches with longing for the past! Thou God of stone, I have a craving in me For knowledge of thee as thou wert in old Enchanted twilights in Arcadia."

"In Arcady there lies a crystal spring Ring'd all about with green melodious reeds Swaying seal'd music up and down the wind. Here on its time-defaced pedestal The image of a half-forgotten God Crumbles to its complete oblivion."

"It’s no use crying over spilt evils. It’s better to mop them up laughing."

"'You're not going to die, are you sir?' he said. 'Of course I am. Everyone is. That's what being alive is all about.'"

"Perhaps, if you knew you were going to die, your senses crammed in as much detail as they could while they still had the chance..."

"AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER."

""I will not feel sorry for myself for contracting Alzheimer's, I will make Alzheimer's sorry for catching me!" Interview with BBC Radio 5 Live regarding Terry's Alzheimer's diagnosis"

"Tolkien's dead. J. K. Rowling said no. Philip Pullman couldn't make it. Hi, I'm Terry Pratchett."

"It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. This is in fact true. It's called living."

"I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else."

""I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do', but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry." - after announcing his Alzheimer's diagnosis."

""I don't mind authority, but not authoritarian authority. After all, the bus driver is allowed to be the boss of the bus. But if he's bad at driving, he's not going to be a bus driver anymore." Interview with Cory Doctorow"

"So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa? More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from? Me, actually — the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2. It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds. I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from."

"Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example. Possibly because of this, I have never disliked religion. I think it has some purpose in our evolution. I don't have much truck with the "religion is the cause of most of our wars" school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God. I number believers of all sorts among my friends. Some of them are praying for me. I'm happy they wish to do this, I really am, but I think science may be a better bet."

"I don't believe. I never have, not in big beards in the sky."

"As a boy I had a clear image of the Almighty: He had a tail coat and pinstriped trousers, black, slicked-down hair and an aquiline nose. On the whole, I was probably a rather strange child, and I wonder what my life might have been like if I'd met a decent theologian when I was nine."

"I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking, I assume, said it was an act of God. You shouldn't say something like that to the kind of kid who will grow up to be a writer; we have long memories."

"Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again."

"There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist. But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should. It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I'm not used to this. As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book ... But since contracting Alzheimer's disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is that I really, if anything, believe."

"Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living."

"Everything makes sense a bit at a time. But when you try to think of it all at once, it comes out wrong."

"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs."

"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. (p.230, in the edition published in 1991 by Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-04979-0)"

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."

"The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them..."

"The Deftmenes are mad and the Dumii are sane, thought Snibril, and that's just the same as being mad except that it's quieter. If only you could mix them together, you'd end up with normal people."

"Mort isn't fashionable UK movie material -- there're no parts in it for Hugh or Emma, it's not set in Sheffield, and no one shoves drugs up their bum..."