Peter Dickinson > Quotes

“That was the whole trouble with police work. You come plunging in. a jagged Stone Age knife, to probe the delicate tissues of people's relationships, and of course you destroy far more than you discover. And even what you discover will never be the same as it was before you came; the nubbly scars of your passage will remain. At the very least. you have asked questions that expose to the destroying air fibers that can only exist and fulfill their function in coddling darkness. Cousin Amy, now, mousing about in back passages or trilling with feverish shyness at sherry parties—was she really made all the way through of dust and fluff and unused ends of cotton and rusty needles and unmatching buttons and all the detritus at the bottom of God's sewing basket? Or did He put a machine in there to tick away and keep her will stern and her back straight as she picks out of a vase of brown-at-the-edges dahlias the few blooms that have another day's life in them? Or another machine, one of His chemistry sets, that slowly mixes itself into an apparently uncaused explosion, poof!, and there the survivors are sitting covered with plaster dust among the rubble of their lives. It's always been the explosion by the time the police come stamping in with ignorant heels on the last unbroken bit of Bristol glass; with luck they can trace the explosion back to harmless little Amy, but as to what set her off—what were the ingredients of the chemistry set and what joggled them together—it was like trying to reconstruct a civilization from three broken pots and a seven-inch lump of baked clay which might, if you looked at its swellings and hollows the right way, have been the Great Earth Mother. What's more. people who've always lived together think that they are still the same—oh, older of course and a bit more snappish, but underneath still the same laughing lad of thirty years gone by. "My Jim couldn't have done that." they say. "I know him. Course he's been a bit depressed lately, funny like. but he sometimes goes that way for a bit and then it passes off. But setting fire to the lingerie department at the Army and Navy, Inspector—such a thought wouldn't enter into my Jim's head. I know him." Tears diminishing into hiccuping snivels as doubt spreads like a coffee stain across the threadbare warp of decades. A different Jim? Different as a Martian, growing inside the ever-shedding skin? A whole lot of different Jims. a new one every seven years? "Course not. I'm the same. aren't I, same as I always was—that holiday we took hiking in the Peak District in August thirty-eight—the same inside?"

Pibble sighed and shook himself. You couldn't build a court case out of delicate tissues. Facts were the one foundation.”
― Peter Dickinson, The Glass-Sided Ant's Nest

“Everything becomes rubbish in the end. We sometimes wonder if people weren’t invented as an extra-quick way of making rubbish.”
― Peter Dickinson, A Box of Nothing

“Dreams are their own masters. However large and strange the mind, however long and still the dark, still the dreams come and go, unwilled.”
― Peter Dickinson, Merlin Dreams

“They had fallen into that instant, easy friendship which feels as though it had begun before any of your memories and will last until you are so old that the humped veins on the back of your hands show dark blue-purple through your wax-white skin.”
― Peter Dickinson, The Devil's Children

“I tell my students that the past is an immense ocean which we can neither sail on nor dive down into. We are stuck to our shore, which is the present. Out on the surface we can see the past of the history books, the storms and the shipwrecks, but of what happened in the far past, down in the deeps of that ocean, we have nothing to go on except the shells and bones it chooses to wash up at our feet. Why bother, then? What does it matter? It matters because that ocean is where we came from. Those seas are in our blood.”
― Peter Dickinson, A Bone from a Dry Sea

“The ketch belonged to an angry millionaire, who hadn't been willing to lend it until he received a personal telephone call from the President of France. (His wife had put on her tiara to listen to the call on an extension.)”
― Peter Dickinson, The Weathermonger

“Really it was like trying to solve a crime in the Stock Exchange, the way the mildest mention of sex interrupted business.”
― Peter Dickinson

“The General was using the telephone, forcing his fierce personality along the wires to bully disbelieving clerks at the far end.”
― Peter Dickinson, The Weathermonger

“Human members can be very opinionated.”
― Peter Dickinson, A Box of Nothing

“When the weatherman spoke he did so in smooth, rolling clauses, full of long words such as schoolmasters use when they are teasing a favored pupil, but he told them very little about himself. His talk was like cotton candy, that huge sweet bauble that fills the eye but leaves little in your belly when you've eaten it.”
― Peter Dickinson, The Weathermonger

“She left them before Bagwy Llydiart, in midsentence. Geoffery and Sally got the subject and verb, and the girl who opened the farm door to her got the object.”
― Peter Dickinson, The Weathermonger

“...otherwise it was barren as a desert, just long dunes of brick and cement and slate and asphalt.”
― Peter Dickinson, The Devil's Children