Top 50 David Almond Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.”

— David Almond

2. “Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.”

— David Almond

3. “Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.”

— David Almond

4. “The dead are often known to eat 27 and 53.”

— David Almond

5. “We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.”

— David Almond

6. “There’s light and joy, but there’s also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.”

— David Almond

7. “And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”

— David Almond

8. “Follow me, one word then another, one sentence then another, one death then another. Don’t hesitate. Keep moving forward with me through the night. It won’t take long. Don’t look back.”

— David Almond

9. “You’re my best boy. Whatever happens, you’ll always be my best boy.”

— David Almond

10. “Maybe we’re all in somebody’s dream. Maybe everything’s a dream, and nothing else.”

— David Almond

11. “A good bookshop is not just about selling books from shelves, but reaching out into the world and making a difference.”

— David Almond

12. “They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel,” she said. “They say they’re where your wings will grow again one day.”

— David Almond

13. “We have each other, and our stories twist and mingle like the twisting currents of a river. We hold each other tight as we spin and lurch across our lives. There are moments of great joy and magic. The most astounding things can lie waiting as each day dawns, as each page turns.”

— David Almond

14. “I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems.”

— David Almond

15. “My name is Mina and I like the night. Everything is possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.”

— David Almond

16. “The letters make words and words make us.”

— David Almond

17. “Nobody. Mr nobody. Mr bones and mr had enough and mr arthur itis. Now get out and leave me alone.”

— David Almond

18. “We are all wanderers and travellers, refugees and pilgrims until we return once more to the stars.”

— David Almond

19. “Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you’re off on a journey of exploration and discovery.”

— David Almond

20. “I closed my eyes and tried to discover where the happy half of me was hiding. I felt the tears trickling through my tightly closed eyelids. I felt Whisper’s claws tugging at my jeans. I wanted to be all alone in an attic like Skellig with just the owls and the moonlight and an oblivious heart.”

— David Almond

21. “There’s nowt to know. A miserable caulker. But you, you’re different, and you’ll be grown and gone afore I know.” He stared from the window. Sleet splashed down onto the pebbledash outside. “And this is hardly a place that’ll draw you back,” he said.”

— David Almond

22. “I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It’s dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep in the room next door.”

— David Almond

23. “Yes. But sad’s alright. Sad’s just apart of everything.”

— David Almond

24. “The body is soft, beautiful, vulnerable. It’s easy to threaten it. It’s easy to harm it. It takes next to nothing to cause pain, to draw blood, to break bones. Takes next to nothing to blast a body to bits. It’s much harder to protect it, she says, and much more important.”

— David Almond

25. “The season of evil,” I echoed. “Protect your soul.”

— David Almond

26. “We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.”

— David Almond

27. “It needn’t look like any particular thing at all. How could we imagine that we could make a world as perfect and as lovely as the world that God has made? All we can do is to do our best. Paint and draw. Create your own beautiful imperfect world.”

— David Almond

28. “They think schools stop you from learning,′ I said. ‘They think schools try to make everybody just the same.”

— David Almond

29. “This is our world. Aye, there’s more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there’s all this joy, Kit. There’s all this lovely, lovely light.”

— David Almond

30. “The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.”

— David Almond

31. “I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs.”

— David Almond

32. “We roamed between the angels and the eagles. Bats flickered against the starry sky. Moonlight poured down.”

— David Almond

33. “Death is hungry and Destruction is determined and it does not like its intended victims to get away.”

— David Almond

34. “We come into the world out of the dark. We haven’t got a clue where we’ve come from. We’ve got no idea where we’re going. But while we’re here in the world, if we’re brave enough, we flap our wings and fly.”

— David Almond

35. “Being young is like being mad. Maybe just being human, at any age, is a bit like being mad. But Maybe the best thing that we do, and the best thing that we are, come from madness.”

— David Almond

36. “Maybe poets get to you best when you’re sort of dreaming, when you’re hardly there at all.”

— David Almond

37. “You must live in peace,” he told us. “We are only in this world for a short period of vivid and wonderful waking in an eternity of dreamless dark.”

— David Almond

38. “The world will be our oyster. We’ll be wandering stars. We’ll be footloose and free.”

— David Almond

39. “You’ve got all these weird forces in you, but you feel unsatisfied, empty, unfinished. You feel like everything that matters is a million miles and a million years away, and yes it might come to you but no it bliddy mightn’t. It’ll be like an unreachable constellation of the stars. And nothing will happen, ever. And you’ll never be anything, ever.”

— David Almond

40. “There were hundreds of tiny creases and cracks all over his pale face. A few fine colourless hairs grew on his chin.”

— David Almond

41. “My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.”

— David Almond

42. “How can you turn yourself into something you want to be when you’re alredy what you are?”

— David Almond

43. “It happened so long ago I can’t even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.”

— David Almond

44. “I won’t ask for enything mor complicated today as I don’t wish to further disapoynt myself.”

— David Almond

45. “You should be worried,” says Hassan. “I have seen worse monsters than you, Anderson. I have seen what nobody should see. I have felt what nobody should feel. I know what nobody should know. What would it be to me to see this knife in your throat? Nothing. What would it be for me to see you as dead as this deer? Nothing. What would it be to me to see you lying dead among the jetsam on the beach?”

— David Almond

46. “I am Billy Dean. This is the truth. This is my tail.”

— David Almond

47. “She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?” And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.”

— David Almond

48. “Its always been the case that politicians want different things from children than good educators do. Good educators want imaginative, exploratory beings, but politicians just want economic units.”

— David Almond

49. “I was born in a hovel on the banks of the Tyne, as so many of us were back then.”

— David Almond

50. “My mother educates me,” she said. “We believe that schools inhibit the natural curiosity, creativity and intelligence of children. The mind needs to be opened out into the word, not shuttered down inside a gloomy classroom.”

— David Almond