Top 300 Ransom Riggs Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I did love her, of course, but mostly because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I’d like very much if I met her walking down the street.”

— Ransom Riggs

52. “It was strange to think that one day I might have my own stack of yellowed photos to show skeptical grandchildren – and my own fantastic stories to share.”

— Ransom Riggs

53. “Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead?”

— Ransom Riggs

54. “As he always says, the day there’s no time for manners, the world’s lost to us anyway.”

— Ransom Riggs

55. “They say it takes seven years for all the cells in your body to replace themselves. It doesn’t happen all at once, of course. You get an entirely new skin every three weeks. New blood every six months. A new liver every few years. Life changes are like that, too: Some parts of your life can change enormously while others seem frozen in amber.”

— Ransom Riggs

56. “How do you say I’m sorry your father didn’t love you enough to your own dad?”

— Ransom Riggs

57. “Which was just well: goodbyes had never been my strong suit anyway, and lately my life had felt like an unbroken series of them. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”

— Ransom Riggs

58. “In ancient times people mistook us for gods, but we peculiars are no less mortal than common folk. Time loops merely delay the inevitable, and the price we pay for using them is hefty – an irrevocable divorce from the ongoing present.”

— Ransom Riggs

59. “To some it might’ve seemed callous, the way she boxed up her pain and set it aside, but I knew her well enough now to understand. She had a heart the size of France, and the lucky few whom she loved with it were loved with every square inch – but its size made it dangerous, too. If she let it feel everything, she’d be wrecked. So she had to tame it, shush it, shut it up. Float the worst pains off to an island that was quickly filling with them, where she would go to live one day.”

— Ransom Riggs

60. “There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.”

— Ransom Riggs

61. “My brother was an opportunist above all else,” she said. “I think part of him did want to do the right thing, and when he helped you and Miss Bloom, he did so genuinely. But all along he’d been making preparations to betray us, in case that turned out to be advantageous for him. And when I told him where to stuff it, he decided that it was.”

— Ransom Riggs

62. “I grew up feeling like a weirdo like many kids do. But I was lucky to find my own home for peculiar children. I went to a school for the gifted in Florida, and it was full of kids who – we were all strange together. And that was a real blessing.”

— Ransom Riggs

63. “Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable.”

— Ransom Riggs

64. “There were wooden toys moldering in a box; crayons on a windowsill, their colors dulled by the light of ten thousand afternoons; a dollhouse with dolls inside, lifers in an ornate prison. In a modest library, the creep of moisture had bowed the shelves into crooked smiles.”

— Ransom Riggs

65. “Grandpa Portman really knew how to keep a secret, didn’t he?”“Are you kidding? The man was an emotional Fort Knox.”

— Ransom Riggs

66. “She had tried to make herself like stone, but now the facade was falling away.”

— Ransom Riggs

67. “I knew it sounded crazy, but crazier things have turned out to be true.”

— Ransom Riggs

68. “Don’t fight the pain, that’s the key, my grandfather says. It’s telling you something. Welcome it, let it speak to you. The pain says: Hello, I am not other than you; I am of the hollow, but I am you also.”

— Ransom Riggs

69. “All my life, normal people had mostly baffled me-the ridiculous ways they strove to impress one another, the mediocre goals that seemed to drive them, the banality of their dreams. The way people rejected anything that didn’t fit their narrow paradigm of acceptability, as if those who thought or acted or dressed or dreamed differently from them were a threat to their very existence.”

— Ransom Riggs

70. “More fantastic still were his stories about life in the Welsh children’s home. It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died. Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird – or so the story went. As I got older, though, I began to have doubts.”

— Ransom Riggs

71. “I felt empty, too, and strangely heavy, like the planet was spinning too fast, heating up gravity, pulling me toward the floor.”

— Ransom Riggs

72. “My brothers taught me a hard lesson. No one can hurt you as badly as the people you love.”

— Ransom Riggs

73. “I left the house feeling like I was further than ever from the truth.”

— Ransom Riggs

74. “I never remember nice dreams; only the bad ones stick.”

— Ransom Riggs

75. “Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft.” She stepped close and we hugged. I could feel her trembling ever so slightly. She wasn’t bulletproof. I knew then that my shaky faith in myself was starting to dig a hole in hers, and Emma’s confidence was what held everything together. It was the life raft.”

— Ransom Riggs

76. “You tread a precariously thin line between being charmingly headstrong and insufferably pigheaded.”

— Ransom Riggs

77. “In other words, being born with a certain ability does not mean we are obliged to use it, and in rare cases, we are obliged not to. All.”

— Ransom Riggs

78. “And it occured to me, standing there, just breathing with her, quiet settling around us, that those might be the three most beautiful words in the English language. We have time.”

— Ransom Riggs

79. “What a beautiful day to go to hell.”

— Ransom Riggs

80. “You’re getting overwhelmed,” said Emma. “Big tasks always seem that way if you try and figure out every little piece of them beforehand. We have to take it bit by bit.”

— Ransom Riggs

81. “I’ll never understand ninety-nine percent of humanity. – Enoch.”

— Ransom Riggs

82. “But Emma. There was Emma. Maybe it wasn’t so strange, what we could have. Maybe I could stay for a while and love her and then go home. But no. By the time I wanted to leave, it would be too late. She was a siren. I had to be strong.”

— Ransom Riggs

83. “Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth – because the story of Grandpa Portman’s childhood wasn’t a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.”

— Ransom Riggs

84. “I felt ashamed for having been jealous of his life, considering the price he’d paid for it, and I tried to feel lucky for the safe and unextraordinary one that I had done nothing to deserve.”

— Ransom Riggs

85. “She had a heart the size of France and the lucky few whom she loved, she loved with every square inch of it. But it’s size made it dangerous.”

— Ransom Riggs

86. “There was a single ray of sun shining through the window. I got up, went to the cracked glass, and saw that it was both raining and shining outside – a bit of meteorological weirdness whose name no one can seem to agree on. My mom, I kid you not, refers to it as “orphan’s tears.”

— Ransom Riggs

87. “I told him I had another statement to make and then held up my middle finger and walked out.”

— Ransom Riggs

88. “I’d never asked what year it was here-1492? 1750?-though to the animals I guess it hardly mattered. This was a safe place apart from the world of people, and only in the world of people did the year make any difference.”

— Ransom Riggs

89. “He made a grab for me, but slow and drunk is no match for fast and scared shitless.”

— Ransom Riggs

90. “I suppose. Though I imagine we’re killing ourselves right now in all manner of ways that’ll seem insane to people in the future.”

— Ransom Riggs

91. “Early in life we recognize certain talents in ourselves, and we focus on those to the exclusion of others. It’s not that nothing else is possible, but that nothing else was nurtured.”

— Ransom Riggs

92. “But you can’t feel bad every second, I wanted to tell her. Laughing doesn’t make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, or that you’ve forgotten. It just means you’re human.”

— Ransom Riggs

93. “The letters were worth the risk, though, and I came to enjoy communicating by hand. There was something sweet about holding a tangible thing that had been touched and marked upon by someone I loved.”

— Ransom Riggs

94. “Just because they knew it was lost didn’t mean they knew how to let it go.”

— Ransom Riggs

95. “But the way she looked at me. Just that crooked bit of smile gave me a surge, and I felt I could do anything.”

— Ransom Riggs

96. “The easiest kind of lying is when you leave things out of a story rather than make them up.”

— Ransom Riggs

97. “I wondered what this odd, well-spoken man was doing on Cairnholm, with his pleated slacks and half-baked poems, looking more like a bank manager than someone who lived on a windswept island with one phone and no paved roads.”

— Ransom Riggs

98. “Enoch’s jaw fell open. “Are you telling me these chickens lay exploding eggs?!” he said. “Only when they get excited,” said Addison. “Most of their eggs are quite safe – and delicious! But it was the exploding ones that earned them their rather unkind name: Armageddon chickens.”

— Ransom Riggs

99. “I’m no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I’m pretty sure that’s flirting.”

— Ransom Riggs

100. “Nowhere am I deadlier than in a field of wildflowers.”

— Ransom Riggs