"He had begun rough and gay and somehow factitious, then his voice had died away into sadness as though truth had risen to the surface of the water and was unbearable."

"Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. It could not do things."

"HOOK. (Communing with his ego.) "How still the night is; nothing sounds alive. Now is the hour when children in their homes are a-bed... Compare with them the children on this boat about to walk the plank. Split my infinitives, but 'tis my hour of triumph!""

""Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!" (Many clap, some don't, a few hiss. But Tink is saved.)"

"Her light is growing faint, and if it goes out, that means she [Tinker Bell] is dead! Her voice is so low I can scarcely tell what she is saying. She says - she says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies!"

"WENDY: (driven to it by something within). What are your exact feelings for me, Peter?"

"The night nursery of the Darling family, which is the scene of our opening Act, is at the top of a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury. We have a right to place it where we will, and the reason Bloomsbury is chosen is that Mr. Roget once lived there."

"As you look at Wendy you may see her hair becoming white, and her figure little again, for this happened long ago. Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret; and every spring-cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland... When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless."

""Bad form," he [Hook] cried jeeringly; and went content to the crocodile. Thus perished James Hook."

"Peter was alone on the lagoon. The rock was very small now; soon it would be submerged. Pale rays of light tiptoed across the waters; and by and by there was to be heard a sound at once the most musical and the most melancholy in the world: the mermaids calling to the moon. Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremor ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, "To die will be an awfully big adventure.""

"Do you want an adventure now," he said casually to John, "or would you like to have your tea first?"

""Second to the right, and straight on till morning." That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions. Peter, you see, just said anything that came into his head."

"You just think lovely wonderful thoughts," Peter explained, "and they lift you up in the air."

"Wake up," she cried, "Peter Pan has come and he is to teach us to fly."

"I'll teach you how to jump on the wind's back, and then away we go."

"Do you know," Peter asked, "why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories."

"But where do you live mostly now?" "With the lost boys." "Who are they?" "They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are ent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses. I'm captain."

"She is quite a common fairy," Peter explained apologetically; "she is called Tinker Bell because she mends the pots and kettles."

"And so," he went on, "there ought to be one fairy for every and girl." "Ought to be? Isn't there?" "no. You see children know such lot now, they soon don't believe in fairies, and every time a child says, "I don't believe in fairies," there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead."

"You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."

"I don't want ever to be a man," he said with passion. "I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. So I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies."

"Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys."

"How clever I am!" he crowed rapturously, "oh the cleverness of me!"

""What’s your name?" he asked. "Wendy Moira Angela Darling," she replied with some satisfaction. "What is your name?" "Peter Pan." She was already sure that he must be Peter, but it did seem a comparatively short name. "Is that all?" "Yes," he said rather sharply. He felt for the first time that it was a shortish name. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Wendy Moira Angela. "It doesn’t matter," Peter gulped. She asked where he lived. "Second to the right," said Peter, "and then straight on till morning." "What a funny address!" Peter had a sinking feeling. For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a funny address."

"Can anything harm us, Mother, after the night-lights are lit?" "Nothing, precious" she said; "they are the eyes a mother leaves behind her to guard her children."

"Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact; not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and tablecloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very nearly real. That is why there are night-lights."

"Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it."

"Two is the beginning of the end."

"All children, except one, grow up."

"With rapturous face he produces his pipes, and the Never birds and the fairies gather closer till the roof of the little house is so thick with his admirers that some of them fall down the chimney. He plays on and on till we wake up."

"If he could get the hang of the thing his cry might become "To live would be an awfully big adventure!" but he can never quite get the hang of it, and so no one is as gay as he."

"At this sight the great heart of Hook breaks. That not wholly unheroic figure climbs the bulwarks murmuring "Floreat Etona," and prostrates himself into the water, where the Crocodile is waiting for him open-mouthed. Hook knows the purpose of this yawning cavity, but after what he has gone through he enters it like greeting a friend."

"I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg."

"HOOK. (With curling lip.) "So, Pan, this is all your doing! PETER. "Ay, Jas Hook, it is all my doing." HOOK. "Proud and insolent youth, prepare to meet thy doom." "Dark and sinister man, have at thee.""

"I say, Larwood, is this tax-planning business really as exciting as these Daffodil characters seem to think or do they just make believe it is to make life more interesting? I mean, if I'd known it was all about codes and secret documents and biffing chaps in false beards, I wouldn't have minded going in for it myself ..."

"Anyway, I promised I'd stick to Gabrielle like a postage stamp for the rest of the weekend, which actually sounded like rather a jolly scheme, and if any sinister chaps in false beards started leaping out of the undergrowth, I'd be on hand to biff them."

"You will be interested to hear, Hilary, that it had a most remarkable effect—even on Selena after a very modest quantity. She cast off all conventional restraints and devoted herself without shame to the pleasure of the moment. She took from her handbag a paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice and sat on the sofa reading it, declining all offers of conversation."

"Julia's unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life."

"On my first day in London I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers I needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment."

"I think the man who wanted to kill Rushdie for writing Satanic Verses hasn't read Satanic verses. I think the Islamists who want to kill me for writing books have not read any of my books."

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."

"The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English, middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution."

"Martyrdom is a privilege," she said softly. "We shall be like stars; like the sun."

"No, not death: birth."