Asya > Asya's Quotes

“You aren't a hero and I'm not beautiful and we probably won't live happily ever after " she said. "But we're alive and together and we're going to be all right.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“Sometimes, on our way through the world, we meet someone who touches our heart in a way others don't.”
― Philip Reeve

“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“Is it...dead?" asked Tom, his voice all quivery with fright.
"A town just ran over him," said Hester. "I shouldn't think he's very well...”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“he cut through the 21st Century Gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal headed gods of lost America”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you knew about straight away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head-over-heels with someone quite unexpected”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.”
― Philip Reeve, A Darkling Plain

“The old curator of ceramics lay near the door, looking indignant, as if death was a silly modern fad that he rather disapproved of.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“Hey!” he said. “That’s one of my best shirts!” “So?” she replied without looking up. “It’s one of my best legs.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backward to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother's star charts like the map of a new constellation.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“You know, sometimes a thing, a system, a creation grows so old, and corrupt, and weighed down by its own baggage, that all you can do is change it. Move on. Start afresh. It's frightening, but it has to be done.”
― Philip Reeve, Railhead

“He smiled faintly, like somebody who had never seen a smile, but had read a book on how to do it.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city's wake.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“Boo-Boo Pennyroyal did not like her male and female slaves to mingle. In the operas that she adored, young people brought together in tragic circumstances were forever falling in love with each other and then throwing themselves off things (cliffs, mostly, but sometimes battlements, or rooftops, or the brinks of volcanoes). Boo-Boo was fond of her slaves, and it pained her to think of them plummeting in pairs off the edges of Cloud 9, so she nipped all tragic love affairs firmly in the bud by forbidding the girls and boys to speak to one another. Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn't notice.”
― Philip Reeve, Infernal Devices

“But that’s what bravery is, my dear. The overcoming of fear. If you’re not afraid, it doesn’t count.”
― Philip Reeve, Infernal Devices

“His tunic lay on the mud nearby, but he couldn't find his shirt at all, until he crawled closer to the scarred girl and realized that she was busily tearing it into strips which she was using to bandage her wounded leg.
"Hey!" he said. "That's one of my best shirts!"
"So?" she replied without looking up. "It's one of my best legs.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore, except in Africa, and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew of Christians was that they worhsipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to things?”
― Philip Reeve, Infernal Devices

“Its a town eat town world”
― Philip Reeve

“It would be best to stride in with a cheer "hello!", but she wasn't the cheery sort; she was the "lurking in dark corners" sort. She found a dark corner, behind the Stalker-cases, and lurked.”
― Philip Reeve, Predator's Gold

“Uncle knows best.”
― Philip Reeve

“He cut through the 21st Century gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal-headed gods of lost America.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“He ran across the main hall and down galleries full of things that had somehow survived through all the millennia since the Ancients destroyed themselves in that terrible flurry of orbit-to-earth atomics and tailored-virus bombs called the Sixty Minute War.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“Waste not, want not’ is the Engineers’ motto, Miss. Properly processed human ordure makes very useful fuel for our city’s engines. And we are experimenting with ways of turning it into a tasty and nutritious snack. We feed our prisoners on nothing else. Unfortunately they keep dying. But that is just a temporary setback, I’m sure.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. “Good practice for life,” Uncle said. “Hard knocks, that’s all the world’s about!” But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return.”
― Philip Reeve, Predator's Gold

“Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn't been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.”
― Philip Reeve

“Then, beaming at Tom and Caul, he topped up their glasses with more wine to wash down the pack of half-truths and outright lies he'd fed them”
― Philip Reeve

“I try to be nice,” she said. “Nobody’s ever made me feel they like me before, the way you do. So I try to be kind and smiley, like you want me to be, but then I catch sight of my reflection or I think of him and it all goes wrong and I can only think horrible things and scream at you and try and hurt you. I’m sorry.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“She was fifteen years old and her life pinched her like an ill-fitting shoe.”
― Philip Reeve, Infernal Devices

“I’ve been operating undercover to discover her whereabouts. All that stuff you read in the papers was just a ruse, designed to make the enemy think I was in disgrace. I’ve actually been working for the Murnauer”
― Philip Reeve, A Darkling Plain