Joan Aiken Quotes & Sayings

Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement. — Joan Aiken

The use of reading, Gibbon says somewhere, is to aid us in thinking. I have always disagreed with Gibbon over that; he may have used literature to help him think, but for me, often, and for most of the human race I reckon (since I have no reason to think myself unique) books can be a mind-stupefying drug, employed to banish thought, not to invoke it. When I am unhappy I can sink into a novel as into unconsciousness. Blessed War and Peace, thrice blessed Mansfield Park; how many potential suicides have their pages distracted and soothed and entertained past the danger point? — Joan Aiken

Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them. — Joan Aiken

Since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary. — Joan Aiken

She thought about Penny's stories. There was one about a man who had three wishes and married a swan. If I had three wishes, I know what I'd wish for, thought Is. I'd wish for those two boys to be found, and for us all to be back on Blackheath Edge. She thought about Penny teaching her to read. "What's the point of reading?" Is had grumbled at first. "You can allus tell me stories, that's better than reading." "I'll not always be here," Penny had said shortly. "Besides, once you can read, you can learn somebody else. Folk should teach each other what they know." "Why?" "If you don't learn anything, you don't grow. And someone's gotta learn you."
Well, thought Is, if I get outta here, I'll be able to learn some other person the best way to get free from a rolled-up rug. — Joan Aiken

You may think it odd that there were three men to look after one tiny station, but the people who ran the railway knew that if you left two men together in a lonely place they would quarrel, but if you left three men, two of them could always grumble to each other about the third, and then they would be quite happy. — Joan Aiken

As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint. — Joan Aiken

But this is your home'
'Not any longer, my poppet. Women make nests but men make bequests and scatter them. Heigh-ho! — Joan Aiken

Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few. — Joan Aiken

Trees are swayed by winds, men by words. — Joan Aiken

Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it. — Joan Aiken

No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true. — Joan Aiken

Her smile was like a swift light passing across a darkened room.
("Hair") — Joan Aiken

If reading becomes a bore, mental death is on the way. Children taught to read by tedious mechanical means rapidly learn to skim over the dull text without bothering to delve into its implications
which in time will make them prey to propaganda and to assertions based on scanty evidence, or none. — Joan Aiken

The first book that a child reads has a colossal impact. — Joan Aiken

I have always been interested in the way that elements of stories twine and combine. At school I had an art teacher, a great influence on me, who disliked man-made objects unless they were old and showed the effects of time and wear; she loved all natural things. I share this attitude and it plays a large part in my writing. I'm fascinated by the ambiguity of man's relationship to the huge, mysterious universe around him; how, on the one hand, we make ourselves little boxes and think to exist safely and snugly in them; on the other, we extend our knowledge further and further into the limitless void; and yet from time to time these opposites collide and produce astonishing results. — Joan Aiken

When the Whispering Mountain shall scream aloud
And the castle of Malyn ride on a cloud,
Then Malyn's lord shall have and hold
The lost that is found, the harp of gold.
Then Fig-hat Ben shall wear a shroud,
Then shall the despoiler, that was so proud,
Plunge headlong down from Devil's Leap;
Then shall the Children from darkness creep,
And the men of the glen avoid disaster,
And the Harp of Teirtu find her master. — Joan Aiken

Stories ought not to be just little bits of fantasy that are used to wile away an idle hour; from the beginning of the human race stories have been used - by priests, by bards, by medicine men - as magic instruments of healing, of teaching, as a means of helping people come to terms with the fact that they continually have to face insoluble problems and unbearable realities. — Joan Aiken

The silence behind her was closing and thickening, and becoming coloured, like water into which a brilliant dye is being poured — Joan Aiken

A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience. — Joan Aiken

Eat an apple,sing a song,
Don't touch a snake as it wriggles along.
Run for an hour, walk for a day,
Hark to the birds and heed what they say. — Joan Aiken

It was dusk - winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger. — Joan Aiken

Night's winged horses
No one can outpace
But midnight is no moment
Midnight is a place.
Meet me at Midnight,
Among the Queen Anne's Lace
Midnight is not a moment,
Midnight is a place
When, when shall I meet you
When shall I see your face
For I am living in time at present
But you are living in space.
Time is only a corner
Age is only a fold
A year is merely a penny
Spent from a century's gold.
So meet me, meet me at midnight
(With sixty seconds' grace)
Midnight is not a moment;
Midnight is a place. — Joan Aiken