Kevin Crossley-Holland Quotes & Sayings

Everything, I thought, everything keeps changing. Changing shape, changing colour, changing sound. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Because you know something won't ever happen, it doesn't stop you longing for it.
I know I'll never be able to speak or sing with my own voice.
I don't know why.
I wish I did. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

A culture finds the gods it needs. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Ymir was a frost giant; he was evil from the first. While he slept, he began to sweat. A man and woman grew out of the ooze under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on the other leg. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

That's what happens when you're really concentrating. Time stands still. Time flies! — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Like any decent researcher, I throw away 90% of my research. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Think of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.' It is equally intoxicating for children and adults. All this 'crossover' talk is something publishers are using as a selling device - a kind of post hoc rationalisation of what was happening already. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

You can teach someone a skill but you can't teach them spirit. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Some things in our lives, we think about, we hope for, we dream of, we half believe. But some we just know. And what I know, Laura, is that if you practise and learn to play this instrument, the day will come when angels stop and listen to you. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Fearlessness is better than a faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Maybe if I ever come to write about my teens and adulthood - and I can't imagine I will - but if I do, then maybe I will want to say a bit more about the ways in which my parents' relationship with one another impacted on me in later years. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Ymir's body is divided so that everything, even his eyebrows, were used in the creation of the world; the four dwarfs who hold up the sky; the wolves that chase the sun and moon; the giant's eyes that are tossed up into heaven and turned into stars: these and a host of other particulars become narrative elements within the cycle. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

The rivers that sprang from Hvergelmir streamed into the void. The yeasty venom in them thickened and congealed like slag, and the rivers turned into ice. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Lif and Lifthrasir will have children. Their children will have children.
There will be life and new life, life everywhere on earth. That was the end; and this is the beginning. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

There are Arthurian legends in 14 or 15 medieval European languages. They are the product of no one time or place. On the contrary, in sum they represent a tremendous mine of human understanding, rather as the Bible does. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

The three sons of Bor had no liking for Ymir ... At last they attacked Ymir and killed him. His wounds were like springs; so much blood streamed from them and so fast, that the flood drowned all the frost giants except Bergelmir and his wife. They embarked in their boat and rode out on a tide of gore — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Playing in an orchestra is completely different to playing on my own.
Sometimes I played, sometimes listened; instead of waiting my turn, I sometimes interrupted another player, sometimes I argued, sometimes agreed.
My flute is my mouthpiece and I felt as if I was actually joining in a conversation. — Kevin Crossley-Holland