Diana Wynne Jones (1934 – 2011)
English author notable for her fantasy novels for children and adults, as well as a small amount of non-fiction.
If you stood up and told the truth in the wrong way, it was not true any longer, though it might be as powerful as ever.
Over scones round the kitchen table, it emerged that Aunt Mary thought Ayna, Gair and Ceri came from Malaysia. Brenda looked at their faces and breathed in half a scone.
While Gerald was pounding Brenda on the back, Ceri leaned back from the vibrating table and looked at Aunt Mary limpidly in the eye. "I'm afraid we don't remember Masaylia at all."
"Malaysia!" hissed Ayna.
"Or that either," said Ceri.
Vivian stared. Never had she seen a boy with such long hair! In fact, she had a vague notion that boys were born with their hair short back and sides and only girls had hair that grew long.
"If nothing happened, then there's nothing to remember," she told herself, trying to sound philosophical. "Of course there's nowhere to start."
"Heroes see things like that," he said.
"It's obviously an enchantment of some kind," Polly agreed, humouring him.
"It must be," he said. It sounded as if he was humouring her.
You wouldn't believe how lonely you get.
"Curse those two time-ghosts!" he almost shrieked. "They made me quite sure you were the Time Lady! But you're not, are you? I could tell you were a real Twenty Century person with every word you said. Mickey Mouse!" he yelled.
People may wonder how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt wondered himself by the end.
"This is a very old argument. The greatest happiness of the greatest number. If you think about it, you'll find it always works out that a few suffer for the good of the rest."
"In stories," Gair agreed hopelessly. "brave men die defending the rest. But this isn't like that!"
"Call it the modern version," Mr Claybury suggested kindly.
"Maybe," he said, "you should be more careful about whom you let your dog bite."
"Not I!" said Jamal. "I am a believer of free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so."
Pretending was like that. Things seemed to make themselves up, once you got going.
"It is of course a magic carpet."
Abdullah had heard that one before. He bowed over his tucked-up hands. "Many and various are the virtues said to reside in carpets," he agreed. "Which one does the poet of the sands claim for this? Does it welcome a man home to his tent? Does it bring peace to the hearth? Or maybe," he said, poking the frayed edge suggestively with one toe, "it is said to never wear out?"
"Look here," Gerald said, "what do you think of Giants?"
There was the kind of pause that happens when people do not like to say what they really think.
Ann looked down at him, spread on the bank preparing to go to sleep, and lost her temper. "Then you should go and tell him! You should look after him! He's all alone in this wood, and he's quite small, and he doesn't even know he's not supposed to go out of it. He probably doesn't even know how to work the field to get food. You - you calmly make him up, out of blood and - and nothing, and you expect him to do your dirty work for you, and you don't even tell him the rules! You can't do that to a person!"
"What you do is find your centre - can you do that?"
"My navel, you mean?" I said.
"No, no!" he howled. "You're not a woman! Or are you?"
That was the trouble with Joris. He was nice. You ended up liking him, whatever you did. Even when you wanted to shake him till his head fell off.
"So you'll be wanting all these hydrangeas chopped down, then?"
"Whatever for?" Charmain said.
"I like to chop things down," the kobold explained. "Chief pleasure of gardening."
"Unprintable things!" I said - only I didn't say that. I really said them.
"I never said my wishes were supposed to do anyone any good," said the genie. "In fact, I swore that they would always do as much harm as possible."
Mitt did not quite forget his perfect land. He remembered it, though a little fuzzily, next time the wind dropped, but he did not set off to look for it again. It was plain to him that soldiers only brought you back again if you went. It made him sad. When an inkling of it came to him in silence, or in scents, or, later, if the wind hummed a certain note, or a storm came shouting in from the sea and he caught the same note in the midst of its noise, he thought of his lost perfect place and felt for a moment as if his heart would break.