Book detail: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This novel follows a young protagonist as she navigates the wonders and challenges of Fairyland, utilizing her imagination and courage to overcome obstacles and uncover the secrets of her origins.
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“Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter - which is the door of death - but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“... but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Because I’m a cat. A big one, the Panther of Rough Storms, in fact. But still a cat. If there’s a saucer of milk to spill, I’d rather spill it than let it lie. If my mistress grows absent-minded and leaves a ball of yarn about, I’ll bat it between my paws, and unravel it. Because it’s fun. Because it’s what cats do best.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Never trust anyone under one hundred!”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Who are you?" "I am Death," said the creature. "I thought that was obvious." "But you're so small!" "Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off-very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Fierce was her needle, and she wore it like a sword.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Everyone is afraid of you and when folk are afraid of a person it usually means the person is cruel in some way, and I think you are cruel, Miss Marquess, but please don’t punish me for saying it. I think you know you’re cruel. I think you like being cruel. I think calling you cruel is the same as calling someone else kind. And I don’t want to run errands for someone cruel.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“That stirring which had fluttered in her on first glimpsing the sea—that stirring landlocked children know so well—moved in her now, with the golden stars over head, and the green fireflies glinting on the wooded shore. She carefully unfolded the stirring that she had so tightly packed away. It billowed out like a sail, and she laughed, despite herself, despite hunger and hard things ahead.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“I have made calculations that would beggar your soul. What is it that villains always say at the end of stories? You and I are more alike than you think? Well,” the Marquess took September’s hand in hers and very gently kissed it. “We are. Oh, how alike we are! I feel very warmly towards you, and I only want to protect you, as I wish someone had protected me. Come, September, look out the window with me. It’s not a difficult thing. A show of faith, let’s call it.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“True names,” said September wonderingly. “These are all true names. Like, when your parents call you to dinner and you don’t come and they call again but you still don’t come, and they call you by all your names together, and then, of course, you have to come, and right quick. Because true names have power, like Lye said. But I never told anyone my true name. The Green Wind told me not to. I didn’t understand what he meant, but I do now.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out: Not that way, child! But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“We all just keep moving, September. We keep moving until we stop.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Temperament, you'll find, is highly dependent on time of day, weather, frequency of naps, and whether one has had enough to eat.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“A girl in want of a Leopard still has feet.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“I'm not lost, because I haven't any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I'd like to get lost, because then I'd know where I was going, you see.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth and, therefore, one hundred percent likely.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Of course not. No one is chosen. Not ever. Not in the real world. You chose to climb out of your window and ride on a leopard. You chose to get a witch’s Spoon back, and to make friends with a wyvern. You chose to trade your shadow for a child’s life. You chose not to let the Marquess hurt your friend--you chose to smash her cages! You chose to face your own Death, not to balk at a great sea to cross and no ship to cross it in. And twice now you have chosen not to go home when you might have, if only you abandoned your friends. You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you--you chose yourself. You could have had a lovely holiday in Fairyland and never met the Marquess, never worried yourself with local politics, had a romp with a few brownies and gone home with enough memories for a lifetime’s worth of novels. But you didn’t. You chose. You chose it all. Just like you chose your path on the beach: to lose your heart is not a path for the faint and fainting.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“I am a golem, child,’ answered Lye calmly. ‘My mistress wrote it there. She was marvelous clever and knew all kinds of secret things. One of the things she knew was how to gather up all the slips of soap the bath house patrons left behind and arrange them into a girl shape and write “truth” on her forehead and wake her up and give her a name and say to her: “Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“War must always be done out of sight, it shocks people and they stop immediately.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Because she did not look behind, September did not see the smoky-glass casket close itself primly up again. She did not see it bend in half until it cracked, and Death hop up again, quite well, quite awake, and quite small once more. She certainly did not see Death stand on her tiptoes and blow a kiss after her, a kiss that rushed through all the frosted leaves of the autumnal forest, but could not quite catch a child running as fast as she could. As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“But cheating has always been the purview of fairies, and as we are about to enter their domain, we ought to act in accordance with local customs.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk and crusty things and dirt and fear and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you're half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it's so grunged up with living. So every once in a while, you have to scrub it up and get the works going or else you'll never be brave again. Unfortunately, there are not so many facilities in the world that proveide the kind of services we do. So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Sweet as cherries, bright as berries, light of my moony sky.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Check your pockets, my chimney-child.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“In stories, when someone appears in a poof of green clouds and asks a girl to go away on an adventure, it’s because she’s special, because she’s smart and strong and can solve riddles and fight with swords and give really good speeches, and… I don’t know that I’m any of those things. I don’t even know that I’m as ill-tempered as all that… Maybe you meant to go to another girl’s house and let her ride on the Leopard. Maybe you didn’t mean to choose me at all, because I’m not like storybook girls…”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
“At home, she loved the movies. She loved sitting in the dark, waiting for something wonderful to begin. Especially, the tragic and frightening movies in which ladies fainted dead away and monsters roared up out of the dark. Like in that cartoon her mother had taken her to see when she was very small, in which the dark-haired princess ran away into the terrible forest and the owls flew at her and pecked at her hands. That was wonderful--because the world was suddenly alive and excited and wanted things just the way September herself sometimes wanted things. Even if the world seemed mainly not to want a princess bothering it. September had not liked the princess so much, either, as she had a high, breathy voice she found deeply annoying. But the owls and the mines and the flashing eyes in the wood--that she had liked.”
Source: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making