Top 40 Philip Reeve Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes, on our way through the world, we meet someone who touches our heart in a way others don’t.”

— Philip Reeve

2. “But we’re alive, and together, and we’re going to be all right.”

— Philip Reeve

3. “The one thing worse than an enemy is a friend turned false.”

— Philip Reeve

4. “An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!”

— Philip Reeve

5. “It will be all right, Tom. Wherever we go now, whatever becomes of us, we’ll be together, and it will all be all right.”

— Philip Reeve

6. “I still feel, as I did when I was six or seven, that books are simply the best way to experience a story.”

— Philip Reeve

7. “These are new worlds, Zen. We don’t have to be what we were any more. We can be anything that we want. We can be humans together. – Nova.”

— Philip Reeve

8. “Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you knew about straight away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head-over-heels with someone quite unexpected.”

— Philip Reeve

9. “I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best-known books, the Mortal Engines series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future.”

— Philip Reeve

10. “It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”

— Philip Reeve

11. “But that’s what bravery is, my dear. The overcoming of fear. If you’re not afraid, it doesn’t count.”

— Philip Reeve

12. “He was going to miss everything. But he guessed that was how everybody always felt. Everyone was losing things, leaving things behind, clinging to old memories as they rushed into the future. Everyone was a passenger on a runaway train.”

— Philip Reeve

13. “Hey!” he said. “That’s one of my best shirts!” “So?” she replied without looking up. “It’s one of my best legs.”

— Philip Reeve

14. “Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine, and stumbled into the path of a religious procession – celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet, ‘Hari, Hari! Hari Potter!’”

— Philip Reeve

15. “That’s what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.”

— Philip Reeve

16. “Moving cities are a fairly hoary old sci-fi trope – I seem to recall they were always cropping up on Doctor Who when I was young, though I may be misremembering.”

— Philip Reeve

17. “Friends don’t leave friends behind to wash dishes for yetis!”

— Philip Reeve

18. “He smiled faintly, like somebody who had never seen a smile, but had read a book on how to do it.”

— Philip Reeve

19. “Waste not, want not’ is the Engineers’ motto, Miss. Properly processed human ordure makes very useful fuel for our city’s engines. And we are experimenting with ways of turning it into a tasty and nutritious snack. We feed our prisoners on nothing else. Unfortunately they keep dying. But that is just a temporary setback, I’m sure.”

— Philip Reeve

20. “Nobody wants trouble,′ said Chandni. ‘Trouble just find us.”

— Philip Reeve

21. “That’s the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what’s real and what’s made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can’t stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.”

— Philip Reeve

22. “But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: That’s one of the rules of the world.”

— Philip Reeve

23. “What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. “Good practice for life,” Uncle said. “Hard knocks, that’s all the world’s about!” But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return.”

— Philip Reeve

24. “She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backward to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother’s star charts like the map of a new constellation.”

— Philip Reeve

25. “As a child I always steered clear of science fiction, but in the autumn of 1977, the bow-wave of publicity for the first Star Wars movie had already reached me, so I was eager for anything science-fictional.”

— Philip Reeve

26. “It would be best to stride in with a cheer “hello!“, but she wasn’t the cheery sort; she was the “lurking in dark corners” sort. She found a dark corner, behind the Stalker-cases, and lurked.”

— Philip Reeve

27. “I was fascinated by The Lord of the Rings from about the age of eight, and that lasted well into my teens.”

— Philip Reeve

28. “Its a town eat town world.”

— Philip Reeve

29. “Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.”

— Philip Reeve

30. “And isn’t that what all boys want and all men, too? Just to be taken seriously?”

— Philip Reeve

31. “Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.”

— Philip Reeve

32. “Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn’t been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.”

— Philip Reeve

Featured in: Romance Quotes

33. “You know, sometimes a thing, a system, a creation grows so old, and corrupt, and weighed down by its own baggage, that all you can do is change it. Move on. Start afresh. It’s frightening, but it has to be done.”

— Philip Reeve

34. “But the look on his face was so strange that I hadn’t the heart to take his story away from him. He believed it, see. He believed the old gods were on Arthur’s side just as he believed that winter would follow autumn and the sun would rise tomorrow. And I thought that maybe that believing would make him strong and brave and lucky when the fighting came, and maybe without it he’d be killed, or turn and run away, which was worse than being killed. So I kept quiet.”

— Philip Reeve

35. “They’re only stories,” he would say, “What do stories matter?” But he wasn’t stupid. He knew as well as Myrddin that in the end stories are all that matter.”

— Philip Reeve

36. “He ran across the main hall and down galleries full of things that had somehow survived through all the millennia since the Ancients destroyed themselves in that terrible flurry of orbit-to-earth atomics and tailored-virus bombs called the Sixty Minute War.”

— Philip Reeve

37. “That’s impossible,′ said Fever, Engineerishly.”

— Philip Reeve

38. “Everyone was losing things, leaving things behind, clinging to old memories as they rushed into the future. Everyone was a passenger on a runaway train. It was true that Zen would be going farther than most. But at least he didn’t.”

— Philip Reeve

39. “I don’t think we are cut out to be evil sorcerers, brothers,” said Fentongoose. “If we were truly evil, we would not feel such sorrow at the deaths of our friends. We would just go, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ or something.”

— Philip Reeve

40. “I have had it with these dumb cakes on this dumb spaceship!”

— Philip Reeve

41. “He was just a rich city boy who enjoyed playing pirates and had never expected anyone to stand up to him. He’d come looking for a fight, and now that a fight had found him he didn’t know what to do with it.”

— Philip Reeve