David Almond Quotes & Sayings

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery. — David Almond

We thought a little longer, and in the end we simply called her Joy. — David Almond

I won't ask for enything mor complicated today as I don't wish to further disapoynt myself. — David Almond

I closed my eyes and tried to discover where the happy half of me was hiding. I felt the tears trickling through my tightly closed eyelids. I felt Whisper's claws tugging at my jeans. I wanted to be all alone in an attic like Skellig with just the owls and the moonlight and an oblivious heart. — David Almond

We roamed between the angels and the eagles. Bats flickered against the starry sky. Moonlight poured down — David Almond

Death is knowing you're about to die,' says Mam. It's seeing the dead and seeing the living all at once. It's wanting not to die and not to live. It's wanting to stay with the last breath when the dead and the living are all around you, and touching you, and whispering, It's all right, Mam. Everything's all right. But there's no way of staying with the last breath. You have to die. — David Almond

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence. — David Almond

There's nowt to know. A miserable caulker. But you, you're different, and you'll be grown and gone afore I know." He stared from the window. Sleet splashed down onto the pebbledash outside. "And this is hardly a place that'll draw you back," he said. — David Almond

When you grow up", I said, "do you ever stop feeling little and weak?"
"No," she says. "There's always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown-up you are. — David Almond

Nobody. Mr nobody. Mr bones and mr had enough and mr arthur itis. Now get out and leave me alone. — David Almond

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two. — David Almond

The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page. — David Almond

Themes around education and learning run through my work. — David Almond

Live an adventure. Live like you're in a story. — David Almond

She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became cold and short and dark. Living things hid themselves away. Spring came when she was released and made her slow way up to the world again. The world became brighter and bolder in order to welcome her back. It began to be filled with warmth and light. The animals dared to wake, they dared to have their young. Plants dared to send out buds and shoots. Life dared to come back. — David Almond

It was great to see the owls," I said.
She smiled.
"Yes. They're wild things, of course. Killers, savages. They're wonderful. — David Almond

The body is soft, beautiful, vulnerable. It's easy to threaten it. It's easy to harm it. It takes next to nothing to cause pain, to draw blood, to break bones. Takes next to nothing to blast a body to bits. It's much harder to protect it, she says, and much more important. — David Almond

A good bookshop is not just about selling books from shelves, but reaching out into the world and making a difference. — David Almond

Words are too easy," he says.
He opens his book. "What looks like truth and sounds like truth might be nothing but a dream, nothing but a story I wish had happened. — David Almond

We are all wanderers and travellers, refugees and pilgrims until we return once more to the stars. — David Almond

What is is?'
'I don't know. I don't even know if it's true or if it's a dream.'
'That's alright. Truth and Dreams are always getting muddled. — David Almond

If you can imagine doing something, then you can do it. — David Almond

The world will be our oyster. We'll be wandering stars. We'll be footloose and free. — David Almond

The beauties of the North seemed to be intensified by the loss we had experienced there, and they drew us back to them. — David Almond

Mum has made a little model of Dad - it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do. — David Almond

There's light and joy, but there's also darkness all around and we can be lost in it. — David Almond

Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. — David Almond

Death is hungry and Destruction is determined and it does not like its intended victims to get away. — David Almond

Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can't know. Why is your sister ill? Why did my father die? ... Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can't. we have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine. — David Almond

Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and ... Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and ... And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling ... paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody. — David Almond

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.
Mina — David Almond

I love afternoons like that, like when we talk about things like metempsychosis, when we learn so much, and explore so much, and ideas grow and take flight, like the idea about the universe and the egg. I love being home-schooled, when we don't have to stick to subjects and timetables and rules. — David Almond

I don't want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I'll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it's possible to be. I'm growing and I don't know how to grow. I'm living but I haven't started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it's like I'm not here in the world at all and I simply don't exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid. — David Almond

This might be heaven!
We might be living in heaven right now!
And we might be the angels! — David Almond

And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds. — David Almond

It's called evolution. You must know that. Yes, we are.'
She looked up from her book.
'I would hope, though,' she went on, 'that we also have some rather more beautiful ancestors. Don't you?'
Mina — David Almond

It happened so long ago I can't even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of. — David Almond

Maybe one day we all had wings and one day we'll all have wings again."
"D'you think the baby had wings?"
"Oh, I'm sure that one had wings. Just got to take one look at her. Sometimes I think she's never quite left Heaven and never quite made it all the way here to Earth."
She smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.
"Maybe that's why she has such trouble staying here," she said. — David Almond

I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs. — David Almond

I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems. — David Almond

You should be worried," says Hassan. "I have seen worse monsters than you, Anderson. I have seen what nobody should see. I have felt what nobody should feel. I know what nobody should know. What would it be to me to see this knife in your throat? Nothing. What would it be for me to see you as dead as this deer? Nothing. What would it be to me to see you lying dead among the jetsam on the beach? — David Almond

Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.
I turn my face towards it and I laugh.
Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make Mina mad.
I laugh again.
Some people think that she's already mad, I think. — David Almond

We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust. — David Almond

Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else. — David Almond

Anyway, in the end, I don't really believe in Heaven at all and i don't believe in perfect angles. I think that this might be the only Heaven there can possibly be, this world we live in now, but we haven't quite realized it yet. — David Almond

It's so strange: grown-ups trying to become young, young ones trying to grow up and all the time, whatever people want, time moves forward, forward. — David Almond

The sounds and rhythms of words are really important to me. — David Almond

Well, well," she murmurs as I back away.
She makes a rectangle with her index fingers and thumbs and looks at my skin through it.
"You're right," she says. "The boy's a living work of art. — David Almond

I do think there is evil. But it is very rare. It is as rare as true goodness. And just as true goodness produces rare saints, true evil produces rare monsters. The rest of us are semi-good, semi-bad, and we live our lives in a kind of half-happy, half-sad daze. We might hope that one sunny morning we find ourselves in the presence of a saint. And we must pray that we do not encounter the monster. — David Almond

What are you?" I whispered.
He shrugged again.
"Something," he said. "Something like you, something like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel." He laughed. "Something like that. — David Almond

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do! — David Almond

The dead are often known to eat 27 and 53 — David Almond

Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light. — David Almond

What is the purpose of living if there are no perils to be encountered and overcome? — David Almond

All of us can do what we like."
"No we can't. You're stupid if you think so. — David Almond

This is our world. Aye, there's more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there's all this joy, Kit. There's all this lovely, lovely light. — David Almond

They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel," she said. "They say they're where your wings will grow again one day. — David Almond

You've got all these weird forces in you, but you feel unsatisfied, empty, unfinished. You feel like everything that matters is a million miles and a million years away, and yes it might come to you but no it bliddy mightn't. It'll be like an unreachable constellation of the stars. And nothing will happen, ever. And you'll never be anything, ever. — David Almond

How can you turn yourself into something you want to be when you're alredy what you are? — David Almond

I have hair that drifts like seaweed when I swim. I have eyes that shine like rock pools. My ears are like scallop shells. The ripples on my skin are like the ripples on the sand when the tide has turned back again. At night I gleam and glow like sea beneath the stars and moon. Thoughts dart and dance inside like little minnows in the shallows. They race and flash like mackerel farther out. My wonderings roll in the deep like sails. Dreams dive each night into the dark like dolphins do and break out happy and free into the morning light. These are the things I know about myself and that I see when I look in the rock pools at myself. — David Almond

You must live in peace," he told us. "We are only in this world for a short period of vivid and wonderful waking in an eternity of dreamless dark. — David Almond

She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own. — David Almond

The season of evil," I echoed. "Protect your soul. — David Almond

You're my best boy. Whatever happens, you'll always be my best boy. — David Almond

Time's Flying," said Dad. He Smiled. He pointed to the air. "There it is, flying past! Catch it!" And he jumped, and caught Time in his hands, and showed it to Lizzie. She took it from him, and threw it up again.
"There it goes," she called. "Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Time! — David Almond

Look at all the life in this," she said. "Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity."
I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers.
"Just imagine," she said. "If every seed grew, there'd be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees. — David Almond

We scoffed at the kids who weren't like us, the ones who already talked about careers, or bliddy mortgages and pensions. Kids wanting to be old before they were young. Kids wanting to be dead before they'd lived. They were digging their own graves, building the walls of their own damn jails. Us, we hung to our youth. We were footloose, fancy free. We said we'd never grow boring and old. We plundered charity shops for vintage clothes. We bought battered Levis and gorgeous faded velvet stuff from Attica in High Bridge. We wore coloured boots, hemp scarves from Gaia. We read Baudelaire and Byron. We read our poems to each other. We wrote songs and posted them on YouTube. We formed bands. We talked of the amazing journeys we'd take together once school was done. Sometimes we paired off, made couples that lasted for a little while, but the group was us. We hung together. We could say anything to each other. We loved each other. — David Almond

I woke up and knew he was gone.
Straightaway I knew he was gone. When you love somebody you know these things. — David Almond

more 27 and 53,'i said. 'Food of the gods,' he said — David Almond

They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house. "What on earth will you be doing with something so large?" said Mum.
"I shall live in it with my servants, of course," said Mina. "Or I shall establish a school."
"A school, my lady?"
"Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities. — David Almond

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that? — David Almond

Yes. But sad's alright. Sad's just apart of everything — David Almond

We come into the world out of the dark. We haven't got a clue where we've come from. We've got no idea where we're going. But while we're here in the world, if we're brave enough, we flap our wings and fly. — David Almond

I was born in a hovel on the banks of the Tyne, as so many of us were back then. — David Almond

Can love help a person to get better?' I asked. — David Almond

Maybe poets get to you best when you're sort of dreaming, when you're hardly there at all. — David Almond

The letters make words and words make us. — David Almond

I know I'm writing better now than I ever did for adults because I'm writing for an audience who know that they don't know everything. — David Almond

Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing. — David Almond

I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either ... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either. — David Almond

I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It's dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep in the room next door. — David Almond

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land. — David Almond

Stories are living things, creatures that move and grow in the imaginations of writer and reader. They must be solid and touchable just like the land, and must have fluid half-known depths just like the sea. — David Almond

I said, 'Do you know what shoulder blades are for?'
She giggled.
'Do you not even know that?' she said.
'Do you?'
'It's a proven fact, common knowledge. They're where your wings were, and where they'll grow again. — David Almond

He narrows his eyes.
"Is this true?" He sighs. "It is, isn't it? That's all I need. — David Almond

She points at my chest.
"And much more interestingly, what's that?"
"Blood," I say.
She gets her camera out. — David Almond

It's always been the case that politicians want different things from children than good educators do. Good educators want imaginative, exploratory beings, but politicians just want economic units. — David Almond

Look at the earth and you think it's solid," he said. "But look deeper and you'll see it's riddled with tunnels. A warren. A labyrinth. — David Almond

We have each other, and our stories twist and mingle like the twisting currents of a river. We hold each other tight as we spin and lurch across our lives. There are moments of great joy and magic. The most astounding things can lie waiting as each day dawns, as each page turns. — David Almond

I think of him dreaming of being married to Kim and of tractors and harvesters and conferences in nice country hotels while my dreams are filled with war, with snakes, with bloody wounds, disaster and death. I keep feeling blood trickling over my skin. — David Almond

Maybe we were mad that day. Maybe some of the things that seemed to happen didn't really happen at all. Maybe many of the things that seemed to happen in the days and weeks that followed didn't really happen. Maybe it was all because we were young, and because being young is like being mad. Maybe just being human, at any age, is a bit like being mad.
But maybe the best things that we do, and the best things that we are, come from madness. — David Almond

In the end she just said ... All I did was to run away for a few minutes! All I wanted was to be free! — David Almond

Sometimes children must be left alone to be still and silent, and to do. — David Almond

We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.
We let the stars shine into us. — David Almond

I am Billy Dean. This is the truth. This is my tail. — David Almond