John Bellairs > Quotes

“He invented the Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who popped out at you from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed, "Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!" Lewis was not scared by the little man, and he felt that those who scream "Dreeb" are more to be pitied than censured.”
― John Bellairs, The House with a Clock in Its Walls

“Unexplained noises are best left unexplained.”
― John Bellairs, The Face In The Frost

“He held the book up to his nose. It smelled like Old Spice talcum powder. Books that smelled that way were usually fun to read. He threw the book onto his bed and went to his suitcase. After rummaging about for awhile, he came up with a long, narrow box of chocolate-covered mints. He loved to eat candy while he read, and lots of his favorite books at home had brown smudges on the corners of the pages.”
― John Bellairs, The House with a Clock in Its Walls

“To fuss is human; to rant, divine!”
― John Bellairs, The Curse of the Blue Figurine

“Then there's no point in our being logical, is there?" said Jonathan...
"What do you mean?" said Lewis and Mrs. Zimmerman at the same time.
"I mean," he said patiently, "that we're no good at that sort of game. Our game is wild swoops, sudden inexplicable discoveries, cloudy thinking. Knights' jumps instead of files of rooks plowing across the board. So we'd better play our way if we expect to win.”
― John Bellairs, The House with a Clock in Its Walls

“There was one big rule in life - the things you worried about never happened, and the things that happened were never the ones you expected. Not that this bit of advice helped Johnny much. It simply meant that he spent more time guessing at what the unexpected disasters in his life would be.”
― John Bellairs, The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt

“St. Fidgeta is the patroness of nervous and unmanageable children. Her shrine is the church of Santa Fidgeta in Tormento, near Fobbio in southern Italy. There one may see the miraculous statues of St. Fidgeta, attributed to the Catholic Casting Company of Chicago, Illinois. The statue has been seen to squirm noticeably on her feast day, and so on that day restless children from all over Europe have been dragged to the shrine by equally nervous, worn-out, and half-mad parents.”
― John Bellairs, Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies

“If I were serious I would never have become a wizard, would I?”
― John Bellairs, The Face In The Frost

“Nutty people don't rat on you. Nice, friendly, ordinary next-door neighbor types--they would rat on you and think nothing of it.”
― John Bellairs, The Curse of the Blue Figurine

“He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest”
― John Bellairs, The Face In The Frost

“I’m good at tailing people. I was an intelligence officer during World War I. My code name was the Crab." - Roderick Childermass”
― John Bellairs, The Curse of the Blue Figurine

“Suddenly the air got colder, and a black cloud appeared - the black cloud that you saw before, since Snodrog was, at bottom, a cheapskate. Only this time the cloud looked like an overdone hamburger, and it hovered low over the Shuffly's head. Then Snodrog's devious machine spread under the Shuffly's unsuspecting feet a glistening patina of Generalizations, and the immobilized hulk slid the hill into the valley below, ricocheting off trees with a sound like wet sponges being slapped on kitchen sinks.”
― John Bellairs, The Pedant and the Shuffly

“He loved to eat candy while he read, and lots of his favorite books at home had brown smudges on the corners of the pages.”
― John Bellairs, The House with a Clock in Its Walls

“Whatever you think you are, that's what you are”
― John Bellairs, The Curse of the Blue Figurine

“You can’t prepare for all the disasters that might occur in this frightening world of ours. If the devil appears or if we find that the End of the World is at hand, we’ll do something.”
― John Bellairs, The House with a Clock in Its Walls

“The professor believed in thought. He was always telling his students that you could get to the unknown by using the known. If you just put the facts that you knew together in the proper way, you might get some truly amazing results.”
― John Bellairs, The Curse of the Blue Figurine

“He selected one of these incantations and began to chant in a loud, wailing voice. All the clocks in the house suddenly went off at once, though it was only three-twenty; the copper pots hanging in the kitchen clanged and whanged against each other; and a couple of the wizard’s books fell off their shelves with a clump. But nothing else happened. Prospero slammed the magic book shut and slumped into an overstuffed chair. He fumbled in his smoking stand for his pipe and tobacco. “I learned that spell fifty years ago,” he mumbled as he lit his pipe. “And I still don’t know what it’s for.”
― John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost

“Ages. But this is just the kind of thing that a town like Cairo, Illinois, would peddle as a souvenir. They pronounce it Kay-ro, by the way. It’s a town way down in the southern part of Illinois, and it happens to have the same name as the capital of modern-day Egypt.”
― John Bellairs, The Curse of the Blue Figurine

“On a shelf over the experiment table there was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put their to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist.”
― John Bellairs, The Face In The Frost

“Wabe. Maybe it’s initials for something like Will All Babies Expectorate.”
― John Bellairs, The Mansion in the Mist

“Well, I never!” muttered the professor as he stepped through the doorway. “If I were the owner of this place, I would fire the people who are in charge of locking up at night. Lets just have a brief little stroll around and then go back to the hotel for the night. Okay?” Fergie nodded, and he followed the professor down the gravel drive toward the mansion. It was twilight now, and they could not see much without their flashlights. Slowly they moved forward, and the only sound was the crunching of their shoes on the gravel. As Fergie walked along, an odd thought popped into his head: Somebody left the door open on purpose. Somebody wanted us to come in. This was a silly thought, and normally it would have made Fergie laugh. But he didn’t laugh. Instead, he glanced nervously at the vast, shadowy church. What if a figure stepped out of the dark and moved toward them? What would they do? It was not a pleasant thought, and Fergie tried hard to put it out of his mind.”
― John Bellairs, The Revenge of the Wizard's Ghost

“He was going to live with his Uncle Jonathan, whom he had never met in his life. Of course, Lewis had heard a few things about Uncle Jonathan, like that he smoked and drank and played poker. These were not such bad things in a Catholic family, but Lewis had two maiden aunts who were Baptists, and they had warned him about Jonathan.”
― John Bellairs, The House with a Clock in Its Walls

“One gusty cold night Johnny was walking home from Fergie’s house. At the start of the walk he was in a pretty good mood, because he had beaten Fergie in three straight games of chess. But as he walked on, he found that he was getting jittery. It was so windy that a few dead branches came clattering down near Johnny, and sometimes a very strong gust would knock over a garbage can in an alley. The endless moaning in the trees was not very pleasant either. By the time he got to the end of Fillmore Street, Johnny was jumping at every sound that he heard. He glanced ahead and saw the windows glowing in his grandparents’ house, and—as always —this sight made him feel good. He started walking faster, but he came to a sudden halt when he heard a scraping noise off to his right. Something was moving toward him.”
― John Bellairs, The Revenge of the Wizard's Ghost

“Late that afternoon Rose Rita”
― John Bellairs, The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring

“When he had brushed a thin coat of dust off the pebbled leather cover of one volume, he saw the words: Register of All Wizards and Warlocks of the South Kingdom and of the North Kingdom from the Beginning of the World to the Present Time.”
― John Bellairs, The Face In The Frost

“He had taken the precaution of closing the inside shutters of the only window, and his staff, though it leaned lightly on the door, was capable of keeping out anyone who did not want to smash his way in with an ax.”
― John Bellairs, The Face In The Frost

“I’ll say I have the key! I have bushels of keys. If you want to know, I also save string.”
– Anna Louisa Thripp.”
― John Bellairs

“and so, I went to work on a brazen head that was going to tell me how to encircle England with a wall of brass, to keep out marauding Danes and other riffraff.”
― John Bellairs, Face in the Frost

“Lots of nuns around lately. Suppose there’s a convention or something?”
– Alaric or Leo.”
― John Bellairs, The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost

“I learned that spell fifty years ago,' he mumbled as he lit his pipe. 'And I still don't know what it's for.”
― John Bellairs, The Face In The Frost