Margaret Mahy Quotes

“Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.”

— Margaret Mahy

“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren't there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer! And what's the use of getting rid of - of wickedness, say - in the outside world if you let it creep back into things from inside you?”

— Margaret Mahy

“For in some ways the world was like a shopping centre, and he himself was a doubtful customer, often ineffectual, being talked into buying things he didn't want, things indeed which nobody in their right mind would want to buy.”

— Margaret Mahy

Stamp, your name is to be Laura. I'm sharing my name with you. I'm putting my power into you and you must do my work. Don't listen to anyone but me. You are to be my command laid on my enemy. you'll make a hole in him through which he'll drip away until he runs dry. As he drips out darkness, we'll smile together, me inside, you outside. We'll crush him between our smiles.

— Margaret Mahy

It's so dark - as if all the lights are just there to make the other places seem darker.

— Margaret Mahy

“Pulverized by literature,' thought Miss Laburnum. 'The ideal way for a librarian to die.”

— Margaret Mahy

What's happened to the world? she was thinking. Everything has turned terrible ... and the bits that aren't terrible have gone mad. I don't understand anything anymore.

— Margaret Mahy

Will you still love me when I'm a monster?

— Margaret Mahy

“These were true things, Laura knew, but they were only part of the truth which was something less orderly than Kate made it sound. Some parts of the full, disorderly truth were lodged in Kate and Laura like splinters of corroding steel. Their feelings had grown around the sharp, wounding edges which didn't hurt anymore but were still there, fossils of pain laid down in the mixed-up strata of memory.”

— Margaret Mahy

“All right," said Eden. "After all, we've got to hide somewhere. And even if they move on a bit faster than we can, they'll still leave signs, won't they?
"Yes, they'll drip blood and leave echoes of people laughing," said Timon in a dark voice. Eden looked at him apprehensively. But then Timon laughed himself. "Joking! Joking! Only joking!" he cried, and Eden nodded, echoing his laughter rather uncertainly.”

— Margaret Mahy

“When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again.”

— Margaret Mahy

“Fear can give you urgent wings.”

— Margaret Mahy

Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon.

— Margaret Mahy

“I don't know everything I feel, but I do know this. You mustn't ever want anyone but me, Big Science. If you look at any other girl I'll kill her.”

— Margaret Mahy

“You won't forget that," Claire assured her.
"I like things written down," Tabitha mumbled. "Then you've got them for good.”

— Margaret Mahy

“Practise make it perfect!”

— Margaret Mahy

“... But don't be late, Troy, or I'll ... " She hesitated and laughed, not entirely happily. "I don't suppose I'll ever need to worry about you again, will I? I don't suppose I've ever needed to worry over a magician."
"There are always car accidents," Tabitha declared cheerfully. "A car could come around the corner and ... wallop! You'd need a terrific magician to get out of that one ... "
"Or eagles dropping tortoises," Troy added, looking amused. "That happened in Ancient Greece, you know. An eagle dropped a tortoise on some dramatist and killed him."
"No eagles or tortoises here," said Tabitha, "but a bit could fall off a plane.”

— Margaret Mahy

“Then, at last, sitting on her stretcher-bed, she took from the very bottom of her pack an old peacock-blue scarf folded around a heavy, square book. She unwrapped it and opened it very carefully, as if guilty secrets might fall from between its pages like pressed flowers. This was Harry's secret. She was a writer.”

— Margaret Mahy

“It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books.”

— Margaret Mahy

“Every writer has to find their own way into writing.”

— Margaret Mahy

“At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.”

— Margaret Mahy

I hope I am not too repetitive. However, coming to terms with death is part of the general human situation.

— Margaret Mahy

I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.

— Margaret Mahy

New Zealand is the only country I know well enough to write about. It can sometimes lead to complications.

— Margaret Mahy

“I once knew a house rather like The Land of Smiles - an old house occupied by a varied collection of young people, mainly students. However none of these people were true models for the characters in the book, though their way of life may have been.”

— Margaret Mahy

“I've never actually been a fighter myself - fighting tires me out and I'm not an efficient fighter anyway - but I have certainly seen other people have great complicated goes at one another.”

— Margaret Mahy

“In a way, the characters often do take over.”

— Margaret Mahy

“At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.”

— Margaret Mahy

“There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and 'live' with the characters.”

— Margaret Mahy

“I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing.”

— Margaret Mahy

“Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.”

— Margaret Mahy

“I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child.”

— Margaret Mahy

“Anyone interested in the world generally can't help being interested in young adult culture - in the music, the bands, the books, the fashions, and the way in which the young adult community develops its own language.”

— Margaret Mahy

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

— Margaret Mahy

“Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.”

— Margaret Mahy

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

— Margaret Mahy

“I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.”

— Margaret Mahy

Ellis's understanding of himself and the world around him certainly develops because of his adventures, and part of that development comes through recognizing other people for what they are.

— Margaret Mahy

“When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.”

— Margaret Mahy

“Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too.”

— Margaret Mahy

“I am really chained to my computer these days so I work in my bedroom, which is a room I have worked in for years and years. It is just as much an office as a bedroom, and during the day, my bed is rather like an extension of my desk.”

— Margaret Mahy

“The shop for fuller figures could be seen through broad, green leaves, its windows full, not of dresses, but fat zeros, pot-bellied legless sixes and bosomy eights, and threes like pregnant, primitive goddesses. In the teashop the chairs were being stood on top of the tables and made a forest of their own, sprouting upwards in fountains of coloured leaves.”

— Margaret Mahy

I don't want to die, really. I'm interested in what happens next, so I've got to keep on.

— Margaret Mahy

“Perhaps every time anyone is praised it means that someone else somewhere is going to be ignored”

— Margaret Mahy

“A man who builds a house never really dies.”

— Margaret Mahy

“Do you think that clothes have a life of their own, and maybe have unsuitable affairs with opposite styles? I mean - you look at some people - their clothes go on flirting long after the people inside them have lost interest.”

— Margaret Mahy

“Time was too much a part of love, for even in fairytales the proof of love was not its first moment, but its latest ones - that people lived happily ever after. Love at first sight was nothing but infatuation until proved by time ...”

— Margaret Mahy

“There's a lot of things you can put up with, as long as you're not related to them.”

— Margaret Mahy

You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.

— Margaret Mahy

I know things are unbearable but in spite of that we have to bear them.

— Margaret Mahy