Aidan Chambers Quotes

I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.

However much you love somebody, you should always keep a part of yourself to yourself. Never give it all. You can never be yourself otherwise.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

I don't actually think “true love” is such a good term because love can only be true. If it isn't true it can't be love.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.

And when someone else speaks your name you feel pleased. You feel wanted. You feel there. Alive. Even if they're saying your name with dislike, at least you know you're you, that you exist.

There are times when you don't know yourself. There are times when you don't want to know yourself. There are times when you want to be what you have never allowed yourself to be before.

Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?

Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.

If a boy, if a man, asks you if you're all right and you say yes, he'll always believe you and get on with what he wants to do. It's just the way they're made.

We resent being faced with facts we'd prefer to ignore as much as being wrongly accused of doing something we haven't.

a joy that hurts with sadness a sadness that is pleasurable a pleasure full of terror a terror that excites an excitement that calms a calmness that frightens.

When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.

You have to know your own truth and stick to it. And never despair. Never give up. There's always hope.

Belief means willing yourself to give all your attention to living with loving gladness in the world you think really exists.

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is.

Doing anything when you're bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored ismooning about and doing nothing.

And trust dies from ifs and buts

The plain unwelcome fact is that sometimes life stymies you.

I cannot live without reading.

Self pity is a disease which does not kill but corrodes.

The most memorable people in life will be the friends who loved you when you weren’t very lovable.

The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.

You get to be wiser by storying the world and seeing it through other forms of consciousness than your own.

I don’t actually think “true love” is such a good term because love can only be true. If it isn’t true it can’t be love.

I don't just want to ban The Bomb. I want to ban all bombs, whatever, and all bombers, whoever, and all bombings, whyever. There have to be better ways of saying no and making changes.

a joy that hurts with sadnessa sadness that is pleasurablea pleasure full of terrora terror that excitesan excitement that calmsa calmness that frightens.

If we try to measure Now, we find it's always gone, has become part of the past.

Maybe we should always start everything from the inside and work to the outside, and not from the outside to the inside. What d'you think?