Top 250 Diana Wynne Jones Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The more I see of witchcraft, the more it seems just an easy way to be nasty.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

202. “The best advice for dealing with cats is: Always greet them politely. Don’t make an unnecessary fuss over them. Be on the alert for signs they want to communicate with you. Never, ever laugh at them! If you’re lucky, you might just find that your cat will decide that you are a magical person worthy of attention. Or then again, maybe they’d just like some fish.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

203. “You’ll be the death of me! You’re as heartless as Howl!” Calcifer choked.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

204. “If you annoy me, watch out! I shall put you in a book as a baddie and then make people laugh at you.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

205. “Seeing Seb’s jeering face, it came to her that Seb had always loved her the way most people bear a grudge.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

206. “Look at it! It’s ginger! I shall have to hide until it’s grown out! Despair! Anguish! Horror!”

— Diana Wynne Jones

207. “She held one of her father’s huge juicy pasties in one hand and munched it as she read. Crumbs kept falling on her book and she brushed them off with the pasty when they fell on the page she was reading.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

208. “But what call has he to be walking around in a charmed suit? It is a dazzling attraction charm, directed at ladies – very well done, I admit, and barely detectable even to my trained eye, since it appears to have been darned into the seams – and one which will render him almost irresistible to ladies. This represents a downward trend into black arts which must surely cause you some motherly concern, Mrs. Pendragon.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

209. “He could not believe things could get any worse – so they had to get better.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

210. “It’s like life,” Clennen said. “You may wonder what goes on inside, but what matters is the look of it and the kind of performance we give.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

211. “The rule was: Lose your temper, lose a customer. She had just proved that rule. It troubled her to realise how very enjoyable it had been.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

212. “Pudgy is comfortable,” said Julia. “It must be a nuisance to look like a china doll, the way you do.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

213. “In this world people are used to doing by magic what we do by science.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

214. “Oh, hello, Howl,” Michael said helplessly.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

215. “You know the way they have mouths that don’t seem to smile in the same way as normal people’s.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

216. “Though he did not seem to want to leave the hills, he was known to amuse himself by collecting young girls and sucking the souls from them.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

217. “I shall die and then you’ll all be sorry.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

218. “In fact, I had time to be maddened by Christopher generally. He would keep calling me “Grant” in that superior way, and there were times when I wanted to hit him for it, or shout that it was only my alias, or – anyway he really annoyed me. Then he would say something that doubled me up with laughter and I discovered I liked him again. It was truly confusing.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

219. “Sophie nearly said the smell reminded her of the bathroom after Howl had been in it, but she bit it back.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

220. “I know Brian is nasty, but I had always thought it was his situation before this,′ Nirupam remarked... Charles could not answer at once, because he was not sure that a person’s character could be separate from his situation in quite this way.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

221. “You can’t blame that genie for hating everyone,” she said. “Think how you felt shut in that dungeon.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

222. “You do not seem to me to be a beast. This makes me quite sure that you can’t really be a man.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

223. “Ann left him there, kneeling among the violets looking out into the fog as if that glimpse of the castle had somehow broken his heart.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

224. “Sophie began to feel that Wizard Howl and the Witch of the Waste should get together.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

225. “I think it was then that it dawned on me that Mum wasn’t going to notice Chris was missing. She has been made so that she thinks Chris is just round the corner all the time. She doesn’t realise that she never sees him. I don’t know why I didn’t understand earlier. If Aunt Maria can turn Chris into a wolf, she’s surely strong enough to do this to Mum- except that it seems a different kind of thing, much more natural and ordinary, and I didn’t really think she could do both kinds.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

226. “There’s an enormous library, which boasts a copy of every book in the world – and many more from other worlds as well.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

227. “When there’s need enough, a way can often be found.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

228. “Sophie shrugged again. She would have to deal with that problem when she came back.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

229. “It was a very powerful politeness.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

230. “If it had not been time to get up, he would have gone straight back to the beginning and started reading the book again.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

231. “She realized Howl was going out then. “You’ll make your cold worse,” she said. “I shall die and then you’ll all be sorry,” the red-bearded man said, and went out through the door with the knob green-down.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

232. “As an old woman, she did not mind what she did or said. She found that a great relief.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

233. “Sophie,” Michael said in a voice of doom.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

234. “Sophie looked up at him. As she had feared, the hard black-and-white daylight coming through the broken wall showed her that Howl had not bothered to shave or tidy his hair.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

235. “It just lies behind the slightly more normal things I do do. This sense that most people are crazy, if you look deep enough. Adults particularly, and children have to deal with them.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

236. “The job Chrestomanci has is to make sure this world isn’t run entirely by witches. Ordinary people have rights too.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

237. “What made me think I wanted life to be interesting?”

— Diana Wynne Jones

238. “That was Sophie’s trouble. She was remorseless, but she lacked method.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

239. “You don’t give hired assassins supper, do you?” Quentin smiled. “No, but when a wolf follows your sleigh, you give it meat,” he.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

240. “And seeing clearly that his princesses would not be able to walk on air as we djinns do, he first ordered me to steal a certain moving castle belonging to a wizard in this land of Ingary in which to house his brides, and then he ordered me to commence stealing princesses.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

241. “He was standing holding the door to the stairs open with an arm that was entirely hidden inside an immense blue-and-silver sleeve. His feet, on the bottom stair, were standing inside the top half of a gigantic blue-and-silver jacket. Howl’s other arm did not come anywhere near the other huge sleeve. Sophie could see that arm in outline, making bulging gestures under a vast frill of collar. Behind Howl, the stairs were full of blue-and-silver suit trailing back all the way to his bedroom.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

242. “Now there, Charles,′ said Chrestomanci, ’you have an excellent example quite apart from rights and wrongs, of why it is such a bad idea to do things to people. Everyone is now sorry for Simon. Which is not what you want at all, is it?”

— Diana Wynne Jones

243. “Is something the matter?” Sophie sniffed. “I’m old.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

244. “I thank you for giving me ten times my former speed.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

245. “Sophie scrubbed on vigorously. “You’ll be much happier when it’s all nice and clean,” she said. “But I’m miserable now!” Michael protested.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

246. “And the scarecrow went soaring away. Up and backward it went, rags fluttering, arms wheeling in protest, up and out, and on and on, until it was a soaring speck in the sky, then a vanishing point in the clouds, and then not to be seen at all.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

247. “Odeio os infelizes – disse Calcifer. – Eles pingam em mim. Prefiro os furiosos.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

248. “Janet had an odd air of being dressed up, rather than dressed.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

249. “These,” Hern said, “are the bodies of two kings. They were killed in senseless hatred, when both had lost nearly all they had. Someone is coming up the River who knows of this, and it pleases him very much. This will make it easy for him to suck out our souls, and the soul of this land, and rule us as his slaves.”

— Diana Wynne Jones

250. “But what call has he to be walking around in a charmed suit?”

— Diana Wynne Jones