John Christopher Quotations

We're a chainsaw outfit. We go in and just cut and haul down to the roads.

He's been victimized. Everybody identifies with a victim.

The apple which tempts my characters is the one that will remove the knowledge of good and evil. I suppose it's something of a reversal of the conventional Eden story: Freedom of thought is perhaps the greatest good, and needs to be fought for and sacrificed for.

We work with as many companies as possible, so we know how their file format writes data to the drive.

With the cost of gas, that's going to be a big lick.

The original version of 'The White Mountains' was probably just about worth publishing.

Stow them in different locations, like a safety-deposit box at a bank.

A reader should know what he might reasonably expect under a particular label.

It's going to be very wholesome. It's going to be an event that anybody can come to. There'll be something for everybody.

In the early stages of writing children's books, an experienced lady editor said that while girls read boys' books, the converse was not true, and I may have been influenced by that.

Morality, for all the conditioning to which the human mind has been and is subjected, is always a personal choice in the last analysis.

His anger was as great as mine, but hot where mine was cold.

Some people are oil and water.

We had been friends. We could not become strangers. It left only one thing: we must be enemies.

I think before I act---and then think again. I am not entirely a coward, but I do not lose myself in action as you do.

There is always something to lose. But maybe more to gain.

It is because they are so strong that she hides her feelings.

What men do matters more than what they know.

You would always beat me; not so much because you are a better fighter as because you will not accept defeat.

And though I remember her name I cannot recall her face. All things pass.

What tricks the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.

The secret of success in battle lies often not so much in the use of one's own strength but in the exploitation of the other side's weaknesses.

There are times when thinking about something is the worst possible policy.

We all have to learn to live with our losses, and to use our regrets to spur us on in the future.

I was remembering the things we had done together, the times we had had. It would have been pleasant to preserve that comradeship in the days that came after. Pleasant, but alas, impossible. That which had brought us together had gone, and now our paths diverged, according to our natures and needs. We would meet again, from time to time, but always a little more as strangers; until perhaps at last, as old men with only memories left, we could sit together and try to share them.

As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense.