Top 300 Ransom Riggs Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 7

201. “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

202. “It was the second time in three days that I’d taken up space normally reserved for a dead body. It seemed like the universe was trying to tell me something and not in a terribly subtle way.”

— Ransom Riggs

203. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Miss Peregrine had shown my grandfather. I was coming to believe I had been sent here to repay that debt – my own, my father’s, and my grandfather’s, too. I tried my best to explain. “It’s not about destiny,” I said, “but I do think there’s balance in the world, and sometimes forces we don’t understand intervene to tip the scales the right way.”

— Ransom Riggs

212. “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

213. “Get ahold of yourself, girl...”

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

220. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

223. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

225. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

230. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

232. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

235. “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

236. “Fictions, whoppers and paradiddles.”

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

238. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

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

— Ransom Riggs

241. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

243. “Upon closer inspection I decided it was, like a lot of things, not as pretty up close as it seemed from a distance.”

— 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. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Ransom Riggs

250. “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