Top 300 Ransom Riggs Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “Because from the day I met her I’d known I wanted to be part of any world she belonged to. Did that make me crazy? Or was my heart too easily conquered?”

— Ransom Riggs

204. “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

205. “Someone make it die!”

— Ransom Riggs

206. “Oh, lovely. Improvised suicide.”

— Ransom Riggs

207. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Get ahold of yourself, girl...”

— Ransom Riggs

212. “And maybe it was childish, this old urge to explore for exploring’s sake.”

— Ransom Riggs

213. “Would my first trip to Europe be spent evading drunken maniacs and watching birds evacuate their bowels on rocky beaches?”

— Ransom Riggs

214. “How could I possibly stay here and leave behind everthing I’d known? But after all I’d learned, how could I go home?”

— Ransom Riggs

215. “I was the perfect automaton: blessed with ability but cursed with ignorance.”

— Ransom Riggs

216. “What a peculiar lot you are, even for peculiars.”

— Ransom Riggs

217. “Claire mumbled into Bronwyn’s lap, “Tell us a story, Wyn. I’m scared and I don’t like this at all and I think I’d like to hear a story instead.”

— Ransom Riggs

218. “He’s wearing a costume,” I whispered to Emma. Then, to the guy: “She doesn’t see a lot of movies.” “A costume?” Emma scrunched her brow. “But he’s a grown man.”

— Ransom Riggs

219. “It was unconscious, immobilized, totally vulnerable. It would’ve been easy to climb onto the ice and drive the point of an icicle into the hollow’s skull – and if anyone else had known it was here, I’m sure they would’ve done just that. But something stopped me. It was no threat to anyone now, this creature.”

— Ransom Riggs

220. “War is a germ that can rarely be contained.”

— Ransom Riggs

221. “Even here – running for our lives, sleeping exposed, facing death – even here, in her arms, I was able to find some measure of peace.”

— Ransom Riggs

222. “Notes are absolutely essential to the process.”

— Ransom Riggs

223. “Despair was tangible here, weighting down everything, the very air.”

— Ransom Riggs

224. “Addison had no filter; he always said just what he meant.”

— Ransom Riggs

225. “What’re you going to do,” he said, “pollinate it to death?”

— Ransom Riggs

226. “It’s not that nothing else is possible, but nothing else was nurtured.”

— Ransom Riggs

227. “There was an iron will inside me, I knew that now, and I hoped I could hang on to it even as my life grew softer.”

— Ransom Riggs

228. “The adolescent phase is rarely attractive, whatever the species.”

— Ransom Riggs

229. “She’d been waging a battle against tears, but now, in a sudden break, she lost it.”

— Ransom Riggs

230. “The human psyche was much more flexible than I’d imagined, capable of expanding to contain all sorts of contradictions and seeming impossibilities.”

— Ransom Riggs

231. “Kev was out running an errand, and because asking one of his drunken regulars to chaperone me seemed like a bad idea, I went into the nearest shop to ask someone who was at least gainfully employed. The door read FISHMONGER. I pushed it open to find myself cowering before a bearded giant in a blood-soaked apron. He left off decapitating fish to glare at me, dripping cleaver in hand, and I vowed never again to discriminate against the intoxicated. “What.”

— Ransom Riggs

232. “Oh for heaven’s sake, you provincial boob, I can speak better English than you can.”

— Ransom Riggs

233. “Such was the way the sad world turned.”

— Ransom Riggs

234. “They were of the past, and the past always mend itself, no matter how me interfere.”

— Ransom Riggs

235. “I think I’m in love.”

— Ransom Riggs

236. “I hate fleeing as much as anyone,” I said, “but Emma and I look like nineteenth-century axe murderers, and you’re a dog who wears glasses. We’re bound to be noticed.”

— Ransom Riggs

237. “In a modest library, the creep of moisture had bowed the shelves into crooked smiles.”

— Ransom Riggs

238. “We all scooted closer on our stools, like it was story-time in some morbid kindergarten.”

— Ransom Riggs

239. “But even grown-ups have elders who know better.”

— Ransom Riggs

240. “Besides, horses were very large, with rippling muscles and big, grinding teeth, and they looked at me as if they knew I was afraid and were hoping for an opportunity to kick my head in.”

— Ransom Riggs

241. “Despite everything, this peculiar life was what I’d always wanted. Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.”

— Ransom Riggs

242. “Because, I thought, a line from Tolkien materializing in my head, one does not simply walk into Mordor.”

— Ransom Riggs

243. “I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover – that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions – so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.”

— Ransom Riggs

244. “She pressed the knife harder against my throat, her hand shaking. She was scared – which meant she was dangerous.”

— Ransom Riggs

245. “Males lack the seriousness of temperament required of persons with such great responsibilities.”

— Ransom Riggs

246. “He was a human exclamation point, but carried himself with such dignity that I couldn’t laugh at him.”

— Ransom Riggs

247. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. But now you’re making promises you might not be able to keep, and that’s how people in love get very badly hurt.”

— Ransom Riggs

248. “By morning I was worn out. My limbs felt heavy as wood, my head cottony. I might’ve felt better if I hadn’t slept at all.”

— Ransom Riggs

249. “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.”

— Ransom Riggs

250. “Through a bombed cemetery, long-forgotten Londoners unearthed and flung into trees, grinning in rotted formal wear. A curlicued swing set in a cratered playground. The horrors piled up, incomprehensible, the bombers now and then dropping flares to light it all with the pure, shining white of a thousand camera flashes. As if to say: Look. Look what we made.”

— Ransom Riggs