19 Quotes by John Bellairs

To fuss is human; to rant, divine!

You can’t prepare for all the disasters that might occur in this frightening world of ours. If the devil appears or if we find that the End of the World is at hand, we’ll do something.

On a shelf over the experiment table there was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put their to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist.

St. Fidgeta is the patroness of nervous and unmanageable children. Her shrine is the church of Santa Fidgeta in Tormento, near Fobbio in southern Italy. There one may see the miraculous statues of St. Fidgeta, attributed to the Catholic Casting Company of Chicago, Illinois. The statue has been seen to squirm noticeably on her feast day, and so on that day restless children from all over Europe have been dragged to the shrine by equally nervous, worn-out, and half-mad parents.

There was one big rule in life – the things you worried about never happened, and the things that happened were never the ones you expected. Not that this bit of advice helped Johnny much. It simply meant that he spent more time guessing at what the unexpected disasters in his life would be.

The professor believed in thought. He was always telling his students that you could get to the unknown by using the known. If you just put the facts that you knew together in the proper way, you might get some truly amazing results.

Whatever you think you are, that’s what you are.

He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest.

Ages. But this is just the kind of thing that a town like Cairo, Illinois, would peddle as a souvenir. They pronounce it Kay-ro, by the way. It’s a town way down in the southern part of Illinois, and it happens to have the same name as the capital of modern-day Egypt.