Margaret Mahy

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

If people fainted from too much thinking I__ scarcely ever be conscious,_ Tabitha began at once. __ think and think all the time, and I__e never fainted _ not once._ She looked over at Barney enviously. __hy do the best things always happen to other people and not to a promising writer?

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.

It changes you for ever, but you are changing for ever anyway.

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.

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?

Your Barney?_ Cole__ eyebrows shot up. __ours?___e__ mine all right!_ Claire replied. __veryone in this family belongs to everyone else _ belongs with everyone else, rather. I__e looked after him for a year now _ ironed his shirts, made his school lunches, told him stories. I made that dressing gown he__ wearing, whereas no one knew you were alive this time last week. But what matters most is that he wants to be ours and he doesn__ want to be yours. That__ what counts.

Something is going to happen, Laura thought. She was going to be kissed. On one side of a kiss was childhood, sunshine,innocence, toys and, on the other, people embracing, darkness, passion and the admittance of a person who, no matter how loved, must always have a quality of otherness, not only to her confidence, but somehow inside her sealing skin.

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.

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.