75 Quotes by Susan Cooper

Then very faintly, he heard above his head the low familiar murmur of the sea outside. At once the comfortable noise made him cheerful, and he even remembered what they were supposed to be.

You know how many there are. You can't convince them and you can't kill 'em. You can only do your best in the opposite direction...

Every human being who loves another loves imperfection, for there is no perfect being on this earth--nothing is so simple as that.

... Sometimes you must seem to hurt something in order to do good for it.

The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the out-buildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away.

I think something quite dreadful has been happening to criticism in the arts, particularly in America, during the last twenty years. In an age which is so much dominated by technological advance, the methods and even the jargon of science and engineering have mistakenly been adopted not only by fringe disciplines like psychology and social studies but by many arts scholars who should have known better.from "In Defense of the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983)

But if you work and care and are watchful, as we have tried to be for you, then in the long run the worse will never, ever, triumph over the better.

Too many!' James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.

He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which--having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles--he found inaccurate and boring.