15 Quotes by Joan Aiken

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

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

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

Trees are swayed by winds, men by words.

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.

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

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

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.

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.