Best 30 quotes of Katherine Rundell on MyQuotes

I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.

I think, actually, everyone starts out with some strange in them. It's just whether or not you decide to keep it.

It's like eight thousand birds, Charles! Charles! Isn't it like eight thousand birds?

But even airplanes heading toward Belgium can work magic, if you have luck and love and Christmas on your side.

But it's a child! You're a man!" "Your powers of observation are formidable," said Charles. "You are a credit to your optician.

But those coins are wishes! You’re stealing other people’s wishes!” The look Matteo gave her was so flinty, she could have chipped a tooth on it. “If you have money to waste on wishes, you don’t need the wishes as badly as I need the money.

Cowardice is for cowards. Fear is for people with brains and eyes and functioning nerve endings.

Governments can do both great and stupid things.

He’d intended it to sound reassuring, but instead his voice had landed somewhere between “desperate lying” and “stern aunt on a deathbed.

He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.

I don't know where courage comes from. But I do know that if you can scrape together just a bit, more of it comes without your trying... So you don't need a great lump of bravery: only a tiny breath of it.

I know these sorts of people. They're not men. They're mustaches with idiots attached.

I just liked the idea that there's still things that we don't know. At school, it's the same thing, every day. I liked that it might be all right to believe in large, mad, wild things.

It is difficult to believe extraordinary things.

It's like they've forgotten everything important, isn't it? I mean, forgotten things like cats and dancing exist.

I wish for someone to be with. I wish to be un-alone.” He hoped shooting stars did not care about grammar.

No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.

Only weak thinkers do not love the sky.

People say we can't do anything about the way the world is; they say it's set in stone. I say it looks like stone, but it's mostly paint and cardboard.

Perhaps, she thought, that’s what love does. It’s not there to make you feel special. It’s to make you brave. It was like a ration pack in the desert, she thought, like a box of matches in a dark wood. Love and courage, thought Sophie—two words for the same thing.

Sometimes it seemed difficult for the adults in Sophie's life to tell between 'carried away' and 'absolutely correct but unbelieved.

The baby was almost certainly one year old. They knew this because of the red rosette pinned to her front, which read, 1! "Or rather," said Charles Maxim, "the child is either one year old or she has come first in a competition. I believe babies are rarely keen participants in competitive sport. Shall we therefore assume it is the former?

There were, in Feo's experience, five kinds of cold. There was wind cold, which Feo barely felt. It was fussy and loud and turned your cheeks as red as if you'd been slapped, but couldn't kill you even if it tried. There was snow cold, which plucked at your arms and chapped your lips, but brought real rewards. It was Feo's favorite weather: The snow was soft and good for making snow wolves. There was ice cold, which might take the skin off your palm if you let it, but probably wouldn't if you were careful. Ice cold smelled sharp and knowing. It often came with blue skies and was good for skating. Feo had respect for ice cold. Then there was hard cold, which was when the ice cold got deeper and deeper until at the end of a month you couldn't remember if the summer had ever really existed. Hard cold could be cruel. Birds died in midflight. It was the kind of cold that you booted and kicked your way through. And then there was blind cold. Blind cold smelled of metal and granite. It took all the sense out of your brain and blew the snow into your eyes until they were glued shut and you had to rub spit into them before they would blink. Blind cold was forty degrees below zero. This was the kind of cold that you didn't sit down to think in, unless you wanted to be found dead in the same place in May or June. Feo had felt blind cold only once.

The set of her chin suggested she might have slain a dragon before breakfast. The look in her eyes suggested she might, in fact, have eaten it.

When Sophie had first learned to read, Charles had kept the whisky in a bottle labeled CAT'S URINE, so that Sophie would not touch it, but she had uncorked the bottle and sipped it, and then sniffed at the underside of the cat next door. They were not at all similar, though equally unpleasant.

Wolves, and stars, and snow: Those things made sense.

Wolves are the witches of the animal world.

Wolves, like children, are not born to lead calm lives.

Wolves, like children, are not meant to lead calm lives.

You will never be tougher than you are now. Children are the toughest creatures on the planet. They endure.