Top 300 Ransom Riggs Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “For amusement, they ingest whatever flammable liquids are at hand and sing badly at the top of their lungs.”

— Ransom Riggs

152. “Just because I’m a capitalist doesn’t mean I’m a black-hearted bastard.”

— Ransom Riggs

153. “There are peculiars all over the world,” she said, “though our numbers are much diminished from what they once were. Those who remain live in hiding, as we do.”

— Ransom Riggs

154. “Perhaps she was born in the wrong body.”

— Ransom Riggs

155. “He was a holdout who refused to give up his post. The last watchman at the end of the world.”

— Ransom Riggs

156. “That’s because the true purpose of money is to manipulate others and make them feel lesser than you.” “I’m not entirely sure about that,” Emma said. “Only kidding!” said Horace. “It’s to buy clothes, of course.”

— Ransom Riggs

157. “That was our friendship: equal parts irritation and cooperation. The cooperation part was an unofficial brains-for-brawn trade we’d worked out in which I helped him not fail English and he helped me not get killed by the roided-out sociopaths who prowled the halls of our high school.”

— Ransom Riggs

158. “The bird only keeps good things about the future to herself, but you can bet we hear all the brown-trouser bits.”

— Ransom Riggs

159. “You could never understand what it’s like, being this close to death all the time. And.”

— Ransom Riggs

160. “School cafeterias had long ranked among my least favorite places on the planet. They were loud, ugly, they stank, and they were filled – as this one was – with cliques of anxious teenagers swirling around in a complex social dance I could never quite figure out the steps to.”

— Ransom Riggs

161. “It’s not about destiny but i do think there’s balance in the world and forces we don’t understand intervene to tip the scales the right way.”

— Ransom Riggs

162. “The sirens droned on, a soprano counterpoint to the bombs’ relentless bass, their pitch so eerily human it sounded like every soul in London had taken to their rooftops to cry out collective despair.”

— Ransom Riggs

163. “I was moved by this new idea of my grandfather, not as a paranoiac gun nut or a secretive philanderer or a man who wasn’t there for his family, but as a wandering knight who risked his life for others, living out of cars and cheap motels, stalking lethal shadows, coming home shy a few bullets and marked with bruises he could never quite explain and nightmares he couldn’t talk about. For his many sacrifice he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved.”

— Ransom Riggs

164. “Even under ordinary circumstances, I still might find a way to live an extraordinary life.”

— Ransom Riggs

165. “I was too dazed to follow right away, because there was something new happening, a wheel inside my heart I’d never noticed before, and it was spinning so fast it made me dizzy. And the farther away she got, the faster it spun, like there was an invisible cord unreeling from it that stretched between us, and if she went too far it would snap – and kill me. I wondered if this strange, sweet pain was love.”

— Ransom Riggs

166. “I was quite possibly in the midst of losing my mind. I needed to get away from people until I figured out if I actually was losing my mind.”

— Ransom Riggs

167. “When I was a kid, Granpa Portman’s fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and to have your life made unrecognised by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be – THAT was magical.”

— Ransom Riggs

168. “We’re peculiar. Aren’t you?”

— Ransom Riggs

169. “Flesh on the outside, metal on the inside.”

— Ransom Riggs

170. “It had become one of the defining truths of my life that, no matter how I tried to keep them flattened, two-dimensional, jailed in paper and ink, there would always be stories that refused to stay bound inside books. It was never just a story. I would know: a story had swallowed my whole life.”

— Ransom Riggs

171. “I’d never met anyone with Emma’s brash confidence. Everything about her exuded it: the way she carried herself, with shoulders thrown back; the hard set of her teeth when she made up her mind about something; the way she ended every sentence with a declarative period, never a question mark. It was infectious and I loved it, and I had to fight the sudden urge to kiss her, right here in front of everyone.”

— Ransom Riggs

172. “Why does everyone always leap to the awfullest conclusions right away.”

— Ransom Riggs

173. “Maybe lots of people go through life never knowing they’re peculiar.”

— Ransom Riggs

174. “You’re here for a reason – and it’s not to fail and die.”

— Ransom Riggs

175. “And eventually the dark peeled back layer by layer, and with imperceptible gradations the sky feathered to a delicate pale blue.”

— Ransom Riggs

176. “These strange-looking people weren’t peculiars. They were nerds. We were very much in the present.”

— Ransom Riggs

177. “Miracle. Curse. I hadn’t quite worked out the difference.”

— Ransom Riggs

178. “It seemed like my parents were always trying to get me to care about money, but I didn’t, really. Then again, it’s easy to say you don’t care about money when you have plenty of it.”

— Ransom Riggs

179. “There were more like her, which meant that – perhaps – peculiar society could be made a safer, saner place, no longer ruled by the shortsighted whims of prideful men.”

— Ransom Riggs

180. “He proceeded to give us directions in a lilting accent, which I found enormously entertaining. I loved hearing Welsh people talk, even if half of what they said was incomprehensible to me.”

— Ransom Riggs

181. “What a spoiled, ungrateful ass I was.”

— Ransom Riggs

182. “They were natural storytellers and beautiful singers; innately charming people who treated us like long-lost cousins.”

— Ransom Riggs

183. “I’m so happy you’re here,” he said. “It’s proof, I think, that the stars are beginning to align for us.”

— Ransom Riggs

184. “There are lots of things I don’t know about you, but I want to.” “I know what you mean,” I said. “I feel like we know each other so well in some ways, but in others it’s like we just met.”

— Ransom Riggs

185. “I felt like one of those mythical heroes who fights his way back from the underworld only to realize that the world above is every bit as damned as the one below.”

— Ransom Riggs

186. “So maybe it was better to leave a few spots on the map blank. To let the world keep a little of its magic, rather than forcing it to divulge every last secret. Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.”

— Ransom Riggs

187. “When the smoke cleared, we saw the chickens still coming toward us, unhurt and seemingly unsurprised by the blast, a little cloud of feathers wafting around them like fat snowflakes. Enoch’s jaw fell open. “Are you telling me these chickens lay exploding eggs?!” he said. “Only when they get excited,” said.”

— Ransom Riggs

188. “I was born on Halloween, and until I was eight years old my parents had me convinced that the candy people gave out when I knocked on their doors was birthday presents.”

— Ransom Riggs

189. “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.”

— Ransom Riggs

190. “I didn’t want to kill the hollow any more than I wanted to kill a strange animal. In the course of leading this creature around by the nose, I had gotten close enough to understand that there was more than just void inside it. There was a tiny spark, a little marble of soul at the bottom of a deep pool. It wasn’t hollow – not really.”

— Ransom Riggs

191. “Someone make it die!”

— Ransom Riggs

192. “Oh, lovely. Improvised suicide.”

— Ransom Riggs

193. “We ran hunched along a subterranean corridor, discarded animal bones underfoot, the ceiling brushing our heads, past things I tried not to see – a slumped figure in a corner, sleepers shivering on miserable mats of straw, a boy in rags lying on the ground with a beggar’s pail bangled around one arm.”

— Ransom Riggs

194. “What am I supposed to fight then with, the goddamned butter knife?”

— Ransom Riggs

195. “Even ymbrynes can’t touch them. In the stories, only special adepts called librarians can see and handle them – and a librarian hasn’t been born for a thousand years. If the library exists, all Jack would find there are empty shelves.”

— Ransom Riggs

196. “I needed all of it. Both families, both families, both Jacobs – all of Emma. I knew I would have to chose, and I was afraid it would split me in half.”

— Ransom Riggs

197. “I didn’t know you could fry toast,” I remarked, to which Kev replied that there wasn’t a food he was aware of that couldn’t be improved by frying.”

— Ransom Riggs

198. “No one here is embarrassed of their gift.”

— Ransom Riggs

199. “She had maintained her strength in the face of all this for so long that we had come to take it for granted, but she wasn’t bulletproof. She might have been peculiar, but she was also human.”

— Ransom Riggs

200. “That house is such an emotionally loaded place for you, just being inside was enough to trigger a stress reaction.”

— Ransom Riggs