The 39 Clues Quotes

“Cat tongues are awesome.
Nellie Gomez, The 39 Clues, Beyond The Grave”

— Jude Watson

“Changes in Relationship with others:
It is especially hard to trust other people if you have been repeatedly abused, abandoned or betrayed as a child. Mistrust makes it very difficult to make friends, and to be able to distinguish between good and bad intentions in other people. Some parts do not seem to trust anyone, while other parts may be so vulnerable and needy that they do not pay attention to clues that perhaps a person is not trustworthy. Some parts like to be close to others or feel a desperate need to be close and taken care of, while other parts fear being close or actively dislike people. Some parts are afraid of being in relationships while others are afraid of being rejected or criticized. This naturally sets up major internal as well as relational conflicts.”

— Suzette Boon

“Your novels show only the tiniest fraction of detective work, the brilliant crime, the tantalizing clues, the dramatic chase, the final battle atop a lofty peak with ocean waves crashing down below, and then ... justice served! If they wrote about the real world, four-fifths of the story would consist of the hero sitting in a library for months and following false leads.”

— Stefan Petrucha

“Great. First the anonymous call. Now letters. Body parts all over town. It was like a scavenger hunt for psychos. Running after clues with a half-deranged, serial-killer-obsessed, recovering-addict cop was not a good idea. Then again ...”

— Chelsea Cain

“There are no coincidences", Silette wrote. "Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs.
To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.”

— Sara Gran

“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”

— Terry Pratchett

“Nikki paid attention to nags because they were the voices God gave to clues.”

— Richard Castle

“Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have.”

— Jeffrey R. Anderson

“The phone is an instrument of intrusion into order. It is a threat to control. Just when you think you are alone and safe, the call could come that changes your life. Or someone else's. It makes the same flat, mechanical noise for everyone and gives no clues what's waiting there on the other end of the line. You can never be too careful.”

— Janice Galloway

“Back in the Aerie she popped her lips percussively as she examined her booty. 'P-ilfering P-adgett's P-ockets Pr-oduces P-ossible P-ath to ... to-' Well, clues and shit.”

— Steven Gould

“Rule Number One is this: If you're open to learning, you get your life-lessons delivered as gently as the tickle of a feather. But if you're defensive, if you stubbornly persist in being right instead of learning the lesson at hand, if you stop paying attention to the tickles, the nudges, the clues-boom! Sledgehammer.”

— Gay Hendricks

“Our archives are treasure troves - a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past alive.”

— Sara Sheridan

“Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Simon had the child's belief that the rest of the world exists as staging for their personal drama; destiny hung over him, casting clues and signs in his path, and he could not help feeling that ha had been vouchsafed a sign, a celestial wink.”

— J.K. Rowling

“Israel's rebirth as a nation after two thousand years is a freak phenomenon of history. But in all the branches of science the observation of freak phenomena yields important clues to general laws. Dwarf stars and human giants, radioactivity and parthenogenesis, prophets, maniacs and saints are all freaks which carry the conditions of normality to a pointed and profiled extreme. So does this race of eternal victims with its flayed skin and exposed nerves, which demonstrates, with the horrible precision of an anatomic atlas, a condition of man otherwise mercifully hidden from us.”

— Arthur Koestler

“I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.”

— August Wilson

“I wasn't really conscious about 'The 39 Clues' movie when I wrote 'The Black Circle.'”

— Patrick Carman

“With the '39 Clues,' we were making history jump out of the page for the readers, so they don't know they're learning. The kids can't put the books down - it's so exciting.”

— Peter Lerangis

“I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.”

— Peter Porter

“MICHAEL: Maybe just this: A manager has got to remember that he is on stage every day. His people are watching him. Everything he does, everything he says, and the way he says it, sends off clues to his employees. These clues affect performance. So never forget you are on that stage.”

— Marcus Buckingham

“The old cobbler had believed in something he called "the signature of all things"-namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator's love.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“I learned really valuable lessons from 'Blue's Clues.' I'd repeat them every day. 'You can do things. You are smart.'”

— Steve Burns

“There you are, Ariadne," said Robin. "The whole plot of your next novel presented to you. All you'll have to do is work in a few false clues, and-of course-do the actual writing.”

— Agatha Christie

“I have about 20 to 25 platonic relationships with women all across the board from professional to artistic and they always give little clues on what they like.”

— Jamie Foxx

“Shakespeare gives you these clues - these little pieces of gold dust, I call them. They tell you so much about the story, the character, the drive, the intentions. It's like a gift.”

— Christian Camargo

“Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.”

— Dani Shapiro

“And it seems to me in that experience may lie at least some of the clues for policy development perhaps constitutional changes as well that Labour will need to make at the national level too.”

— Patricia Hewitt

“The trouble with being inspired to perform the impossible was that the inspiration gave you no clues to the practical means.”

— Ken Follett

“When we got home, she'd trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I'd done to displease her.”

— Gillian Flynn

“Members of the Coyote Clan are not easily identified, but there are clues. You can see it in their eyes. They are joyful and they are fierce. They can cry louder and laugh harder than anyone on the planet. And they have an enormous range.
The Coyote Clan is a raucous bunch: they have drunk from desert potholes and belched forth toads. They tell stories with such virtuosity that you'll swear you've been in the presence of preachers.
The Coyote Clan is also serene. They can float on their backs down the length of any river or lose entire afternoons to the contemplation of stone.
Members of the Clan court risk and will dance on slickrock as flash floods erode the ground beneath their feet. It doesn't matter. They understand the earth re-creates itself day after day.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

“All words at all times, true or false, whispered or shouted, are clues to the workings of the human heart.”

— Kate DiCamillo

“I loved the idea of making history interesting for kids! When Scholastic approached me about 'The 39 Clues', I immediately started going through the 'greatest hits' from my years as a social studies teacher, and picked the historical characters and eras that most appealed to my students.”

— Rick Riordan

“I saw 'The 39 Clues' as a potential vehicle for doing some education in a fun way - to take some of these amazing stories from history, dust them off and make them alive.”

— Rick Riordan

“In the things we love lie clues to who we are. What we want for those we love.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

“Fulgham's team started by coming up with more than one thousand scenarios in which Sentinel could be useful, everything from inputting victims' statements to tracking evidence to interfacing with FBI databases that looked for patterns among clues. Then they started working backward to figure out what kind of software should accommodate each need. Every morning, the team conducted a "stand-up"-meetings where everyone stood to encourage brevity-and recounted the previous day's work and what they hoped to accomplish over the next twenty-four hours.”

— Charles Duhigg

“If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand-things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability," says Anderson. "For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, the not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. And Blue's Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

“Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.”

— Sara Sheridan

“Generally people don't recomend this type of book at all. It is far too interesting. Perhaps you have had other books recomended to you. Perhaps, even, you have been given books by friends, parents, teachers, then told that these books are the type you have to read. Those books are invariably described as "important"- which in my experience, pretty much means that they're boring. (words like meaningful and thoughtful are other good clues.)”

— Brandon Sanderson

“The game of business used to be like football: size mattered. Then it changed to basketball: speed and agility. Today, business is more like chess. Customer priorities change continually, and the signals given by these changes are vital clues to the next cycle of growth ...”

— Adrian Slywotzky

“From first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take in all our clues about living from the people and powers around us.”

— Parker J. Palmer

“There are clues in the script ... he will say "I think drugs are immoral"' ... but the guy who says that kills, tortures, pimps and has whores working for him. There is this strange morality going on, which is rather like the Mafia.”

— David Suchet

“Of all the weapons of destruction that man could invent, the most terrible-and the most powerful-was the word. Daggers and spears left traces of blood; arrows could be seen at a distance. Poisons were detected in the end and avoided. But the word managed to destroy without leaving clues.”

— Paulo Coelho

“In a mystery, you must play fair by giving all the clues, but disguise them by immediately distracting the reader with something else.”

— Joan Lowery Nixon

“One of the clues that I chased was that Dan Cooper, whoever he was, found an old magazine story called "How to Leave Your Life." And followed the directions on how to leave your life, and just went to the beach one day with his wife and kids, and said he needed to go to the bathroom, and went to the restroom at the beach and never came home”

— Geoffrey Gray

“Occurrences which according to received theories ought not to happen, are the facts which serve as clues to new discoveries”

— John Herschel

“The little things that you do From across the room I see you sendin' me clues They're in the way You make me move”

— Demi Lovato

“I do not remember joy or sorrow in childhood, but listening for clues.”

— Mason Cooley

“Out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy, out in the back seat of my '60 Chevy. Workin' on mysteries without any clues, workin' on our night moves.”

— Bob Seger

“Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”

— Joseph Campbell

“I like films that don't have that unonimity of a response; that don't have consensus in the audience. What it is essentially for me is that if you go back and watch the film a second time, do you feel that you've been played fair with? Are all the clues in place? Indeed, sometimes these things are even overstated. Specifically, for that reason.”

— Christopher Nolan