459 Quotes by Ransom Riggs

School cafeterias had long ranked among my least favorite places on the planet. They were loud, ugly, they stank, and they were filled – as this one was – with cliques of anxious teenagers swirling around in a complex social dance I could never quite figure out the steps to.

I left the house feeling like I was further than ever from the truth.

I felt even more cheated when I realized that most of Grandpa Portman’s best stories couldn’t possibly be true. The tallest tales were always about his childhood, like how he was born in Poland but at twelve had been shipped off to a children’s home in Wales. When I would ask why he had to leave his parents, his answer was always the same: because the monsters were after him. Poland was simply rotten with them, he said.

Miss Peregrine had shown my grandfather. I was coming to believe I had been sent here to repay that debt – my own, my father’s, and my grandfather’s, too. I tried my best to explain. “It’s not about destiny,” I said, “but I do think there’s balance in the world, and sometimes forces we don’t understand intervene to tip the scales the right way.

We are echolocators,” Joel-and-Peter said. They were also, apparently, very sharp of hearing.

The letters were worth the risk, though, and I came to enjoy communicating by hand. There was something sweet about holding a tangible thing that had been touched and marked upon by someone I loved.

There was something sweet about holding a tangible thing that had been touched and marked upon by someone I loved.

I’m no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I’m pretty sure that’s flirting.

Through a bombed cemetery, long-forgotten Londoners unearthed and flung into trees, grinning in rotted formal wear. A curlicued swing set in a cratered playground. The horrors piled up, incomprehensible, the bombers now and then dropping flares to light it all with the pure, shining white of a thousand camera flashes. As if to say: Look. Look what we made.