Ransom Riggs Quotes & Sayings

Buy one get none free! — Ransom Riggs

Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time. — Ransom Riggs

I discovered Emerson's soporific qualities by falling asleep with my face in the book, drooling all over an essay called 'Self-Reliance' ... — Ransom Riggs

The trouble with the merely unwise/deeply stupid line is that you often don't know which side you're on until it's too late. — Ransom Riggs

This is a madhouse!" said Horace. Deirdre laughed. "No, doveling. It's a menagerie. — Ransom Riggs

Oh, thank heavens! Someone remembered the bath mat," Enoch deadpanned. "We are saved. — Ransom Riggs

A world so afraid of otherness. — Ransom Riggs

No, I don't blame him. Just miss him is all.'
'Still?'
'Every day. — Ransom Riggs

We're peculiar," he replied, sounding a bit puzzled. "Aren't you? — Ransom Riggs

I grew up feeling like a weirdo like many kids do. But I was lucky to find my own home for peculiar children. I went to a school for the gifted in Florida, and it was full of kids who - we were all strange together. And that was a real blessing. — Ransom Riggs

I knew it sounded crazy, but crazier things have turned out to be true. — Ransom Riggs

I needed all of it. Both families, both families, both Jacobs - all of Emma. I knew I would have to chose, and I was afraid it would split me in half. — Ransom Riggs

You're the most obviously peculiar bunch of peculiars I've ever laid eyes on. — Ransom Riggs

They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn't that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chamges was miracle enough. — Ransom Riggs

I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn't know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn't care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather's family had been taken from him and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn't have a dad. And how I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling down house and crying hot stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy year old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom. — Ransom Riggs

It's hard to run in a Florida woods, where every square foot not occupied by trees is bristling with thigh-high palmetto spears and nets of entangling skunk vine, but I did my best, — Ransom Riggs

That's because the true purpose of money is to manipulate others and make them feel lesser than you." "I'm not entirely sure about that," Emma said. "Only kidding!" said Horace. "It's to buy clothes, of course. — Ransom Riggs

There were wooden toys moldering in a box; crayons on a windowsill, their colors dulled by the light of ten thousand afternoons; a dollhouse with dolls inside, lifers in an ornate prison. In a modest library, the creep of moisture had bowed the shelves into crooked smiles. — Ransom Riggs

-Tell me where that bird is.=

-She's in the drawer.-

-What drawer?-

-Same one she's always been in.-

-What drawer?!

-Your mother's knickers drawer,- and he spat right in Mr. White's face. — Ransom Riggs

I used to dream of escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss. — Ransom Riggs

I own a few thousand snapshots, which is small by the standards of most collectors I know. I generally only buy photos I think I may actually be able to use in a book one day. I need that focus when buying, because without it I'd just buy everything and my house would be overrun with bucket loads of snapshots; there are just too many beautiful images in the world, and I'd need to own them all. — Ransom Riggs

We aren't so different. Outcasts and wanderers all - souls clinging to the margins of the world. — Ransom Riggs

We slid down on our behinds, little avalanches of sand pouring around our feet and down our pants. — Ransom Riggs

Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren't lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth - because the story of Grandpa Portman's childhood wasn't a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story. — Ransom Riggs

I love being peculiar, Jacob- It's the very core of who i am. But there are days i wish i could turn it off. — Ransom Riggs

there would always be stories that refused to stay bound inside books. — Ransom Riggs

Consider the simple hedgehog, and his neighbor, the opossum ... do they waste their energy trying to throw one another into chasms when they face a common enemy, the winter? No! — Ransom Riggs

I did love her, of course, but mostly because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I'd like very much if I met her walking down the street. — Ransom Riggs

What a beautiful day to go to hell — Ransom Riggs

I hate fleeing as much as anyone," I said, "but Emma and I look like nineteenth-century axe murderers, and you're a dog who wears glasses. We're bound to be noticed. — Ransom Riggs

When we broke the surface again the first thing I saw was the great bold stripe of the Milky Way painted across the heavens, and it occurred to me that together the fish and the stars formed a complete system, coincident parts of some ancient and mysterious whole. — Ransom Riggs

Dogs can't speak English. Nor any human language - save, in one notable exception, Luxembourgish, which is only comprehensible to bankers and Luxembourgers, and therefore hardly of any use at all. No, you've eaten something disagreeable and are having a nightmare, that's all. — Ransom Riggs

Forgive me. I continue to underestimate the breadth of your ignorance. — Ransom Riggs

I haven't known you too long, but I feel I know your heart, and it's a strong, true thing - a peculiar heart - and I trust you." She — Ransom Riggs

Those who escaped the noose settled here, at the very bottom, the absolute edge of peculiar society. Exiled from the outcasts of outcasts — Ransom Riggs

If you must fail," he said grandly, "fail spectacularly! — Ransom Riggs

The bird only keeps good things about the future to herself, but you can bet we hear all the brown-trouser bits. — Ransom Riggs

He was, I suppose, my best friend, which is a less pathetic way of saying he was my only friend. — Ransom Riggs

Why did we have more than we knew what to do with, while they had less than they needed to stay alive? — Ransom Riggs

I slammed out of the [house] and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door. — Ransom Riggs

The last act was to infect me with nightmares and paranoid delusions that would take years of therapy and metabolism-wrecking medications to rout out. — Ransom Riggs

The sirens droned on, a soprano counterpoint to the bombs' relentless bass, their pitch so eerily human it sounded like every soul in London had taken to their rooftops to cry out collective despair. — Ransom Riggs

I hope I'll be able to come home, someday. But there are things I need to do first. I just want you to know I love you and Mom, and I'm not doing any of this to hurt you." "We love you, too, Jake, and if it's drugs, or whatever it is, we don't care. We'll get you right again. Like I said, you're confused." "No, Dad. I'm peculiar. — Ransom Riggs

When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking. — Ransom Riggs

But you can't feel bad every second, I wanted to tell her. Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human. — Ransom Riggs

I didn't want to kill the hollow any more than I wanted to kill a strange animal. In the course of leading this creature around by the nose, I had gotten close enough to understand that there was more than just void inside it. There was a tiny spark, a little marble of soul at the bottom of a deep pool. It wasn't hollow - not really. — Ransom Riggs

There were too many things to be terrified of, a hundred horror scenarios all vying for attention in my brain. — Ransom Riggs

Somehow I had tamed the nightmare, cast a spell over it. But sleeping things wake and spells wear off, especially those cast by accident, and beneath its placid surface I could feel the hollow boiling. Addison — Ransom Riggs

Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft." She stepped close and we hugged. I could feel her trembling ever so slightly. She wasn't bulletproof. I knew then that my shaky faith in myself was starting to dig a hole in hers, and Emma's confidence was what held everything together. It was the life raft. — Ransom Riggs

I do," he replied.
And that was all it took. — Ransom Riggs

That was our friendship: equal parts irritation and cooperation. — Ransom Riggs

What you are is three-quarters stupid. — Ransom Riggs

For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved. — Ransom Riggs

The peculiarity for which they'd been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. — Ransom Riggs

Even here - running for our lives, sleeping exposed, facing death - even here, in her arms, I was able to find some measure of peace. — Ransom Riggs

The ends of the earth, the depths of the sea, the darkness of time, you have chosen all three. - E. M. Forster — Ransom Riggs

What're you going to do," he said, "pollinate it to death? — Ransom Riggs

With each step and each turn, we threaded deeper inside a knot, one I feared we'd never work apart. The — Ransom Riggs

I could taste Millard's blood in the water. — Ransom Riggs

I'd been dreaming of such adventures since I was small. Back then I'd believed in destiny, and believed in it absolutely, with every strand and fiber of my little kid heart. I'd felt it like an itch in my chest while listening to my grandfather's extraordinary stories. "One day that will be me." What felt like obligation now had been a promise back then - that one day I would escape my little town and live an extraordinary life as he had done; and that one day, like Grandpa Portman, I would do something that mattered. — Ransom Riggs

Males lack the seriousness of temperament required of persons with such great responsibilities. — Ransom Riggs

I wanted to tell her then that I loved her. I thought that might help, by grounding us in something we were sure about rather than everything we weren't. — Ransom Riggs

He was scared of us, and that, more than anything else, made me scared of him. His fear made him unpredictable. — Ransom Riggs

Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries - but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was. — Ransom Riggs

I'd always known I was strange. I never dreamed I was peculiar. — Ransom Riggs

Suddenly I was cocooned in silent,blissful darkness,with only the whisper of distant waves to remind me where I was. — Ransom Riggs

Claire mumbled into Bronwyn's lap, Tell us a story, Wyn. I'm scared and I don't like this at all and I think I'd like to hear a story instead. — Ransom Riggs

Because from the day I met her I'd known I wanted to be part of any world she belonged to. Did that make me crazy? Or was my heart too easily conquered? — Ransom Riggs

When the smoke cleared, we saw the chickens still coming toward us, unhurt and seemingly unsurprised by the blast, a little cloud of feathers wafting around them like fat snowflakes. Enoch's jaw fell open. "Are you telling me these chickens lay exploding eggs?!" he said. "Only when they get excited," said — Ransom Riggs

These strange-looking people weren't peculiars. They were nerds. We were very much in the present. — Ransom Riggs

I wouldn't leave her behind for anything. And not because I was noble or brave or chivalrous. I'm not any of those things. I was afraid that leaving her behind would rip me in half. And — Ransom Riggs

Because if Grandpa Portman wasn't honorable and good, I wasn't sure anyone could be. — Ransom Riggs

I wondered what this odd, well-spoken man was doing on Cairnholm, with his pleated slacks and half-baked poems, looking more like a bank manager than someone who lived on a windswept island with one phone and no paved roads. — Ransom Riggs

The adolescent phase is rarely attractive, whatever the species. — Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a amazing book, I love it — Ransom Riggs

We love you, too, Jake, and if it's drugs or whatever it is, we don't care. We'll get you right again. Like I said your confused."
"No, dad. I'm peculiar." Then I hung up the phone, using a language I didn't know I knew, I ordered the hollow to stand.
Obedient as a shadow, it did. — Ransom Riggs

To have endured horrors, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that honorable and brave - that was magical. — Ransom Riggs

Beyond our grim circle, the underground station looked like the aftermath of a nightclub bombing. Steam from burst pipes shrieked forth in ghostly curtains. Splintered monitors swung broken-necked from the ceiling. A sea of shattered glass spread all the way to the tracks, flashing in the hysterical strobe of red emergency lights like an acre-wide disco ball. — Ransom Riggs

More fantastic still were his stories about life in the Welsh children's home. It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died. Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird - or so the story went. As I got older, though, I began to have doubts. — Ransom Riggs

I'll never understand ninety-nine percent of humanity. - Enoch — Ransom Riggs

It's a scarf," said Horace. "Miss P was able to smuggle me a pair of needles, and I knitted it while I was in my cell. I reckon that making it kept me from going mad in there." I thanked him and unfolded it. The scarf was simple and gray with knotted tassels on the ends, but it was well made and even had my initials monogrammed in one corner. JP. — Ransom Riggs

...it was both raining and shining outside - a bit of meteorological weirdness whose name no one can seem to agree on. — Ransom Riggs

Then he got quiet, lost in memories of a better time. — Ransom Riggs

And I knew that the minute I got cocky - the minute I stopped being pants-wettingly terrified of hollowgast - something terrible would happen. — Ransom Riggs

And if he's scared of us, Jacob..." She narrowed her eyes at me. "That means there's something to be scared of. — Ransom Riggs

and he seemed to remember himself, and said: "We found something else, though. — Ransom Riggs

No one can hurt you as badly as the people you love. — Ransom Riggs

Notes are absolutely essential to the process. — Ransom Riggs

I should warn you: this is an ambrosia den, and there'll be peculiars in there who are lit out of their minds. Don't talk to them, and whatever you do, don't look them in the eye. I know people who've been blinded that way. — Ransom Riggs

Not to mention the lack of a seatbelt on a horse — Ransom Riggs

I searched for the words, but they'd gotten shy. — Ransom Riggs

But the way she looked at me. Just that crooked bit of smile gave me a surge, and I felt I could do anything. — Ransom Riggs

Brief prayers were muttered for Martin's soul, and then people began trading theories. Within minutes the place was a smoke-filled den of tipsy Sherlock Holmses. — Ransom Riggs

Let me see: There's Miss Garnnett in Ireland, in June of 1770; Miss Nightjar in Swansea on April 3, 1901; Miss Avocet and Miss Bunting together in Derbyshire on Saint Swithin's Day of 1867; Miss Treecreeper I don't remmeber where exactly
oh, and dear Miss Finch. — Ransom Riggs

Don't get so choked," Enoch said, "you know I can't stand it. Anyway, it's cruel, waking Victor. He likes it where he is."
"And where's that?" I said.
"Who knows? But whenever we rouse him for a chat he seems in a dreadful hurry to get back. — Ransom Riggs

No one here is embarrassed of their gift. — Ransom Riggs

What am I supposed to fight then with, the goddamned butter knife? — Ransom Riggs

They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how we interfere." "Which is why you can't go back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war from happening," said Enoch. "History heals itself. Isn't that interesting? — Ransom Riggs

Let me see: There's Miss Gannett in Ireland, in June of 1770; Miss Nightjar in Swansea on April 3, 1901; Miss Avocet and Miss Bunting together in Derbyshire on Saint Swithin's Day of 1867; Miss Treecreeper I don't remember where exactly - oh, and dear Miss Finch. Somewhere I have a lovely photograph of her. — Ransom Riggs

UK - that was Britain. — Ransom Riggs