L.P. Donnelli Quotes

“Mike stood in-line, waiting for the mealtime muck that passed for lunch at his school canteen. He knew he was getting close to the front now, as he tightly held his tray. Not just because he could see this as you might expect, but because he could smell Margery the school cook’s body odour. The children at the front were already holding their breath. You could see a line of pink faces close to him, to red, then purple closest to Margery. Only when they left at the end did they breathe for air and turn back to their normal colour again, like a deep sea diver after a long plunge. “Margery the Meal Murderer” was her name for most school kids.”

“Generally by the time you are Real most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you are Real you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand.”

“Generally by the time you are Real most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you are Real you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand.”

“Waiting is one of the great arts.”

“I am one of those people who are blessed ... with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it.”

“The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.”

“When the habitually even-tempered suddenly fly into a passion that explosion is apt to be more impressive than the outburst of the most violent amongst us.”

“Mourning is not forgetting. ... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.”

“However carefully a judge is protected by the experience and the logic of the law, there must be times -not many, I know, or we should have no judges- when the same frightful question must be answered. Not faced, you see, but answered. Every now and again he must have to say to himself, in effect, "Everyone agrees that this colour is black, and my reason tells me it is so, but on my soul, do I know?”

“If he's a poet, why's he in jail?" demanded a suspicious voice. Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders. "Perhaps he writes free verse," she suggested cunningly. A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed form their eternal task of cheering prisoners--so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread.”