30 Quotes From The Best-Selling Author That Wrote For A Generation Of Misfits And Outcasts

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known…”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“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, amazon.com

“Sometimes it's better not to look back.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“What an unchallenging life it would be if we always got things right on the first go.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“To have endured horrors, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that honorable and brave— that was magical.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around--they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“She moved to pinch me again but I blocked her hand. I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“I didn’t know what to call it, what was happening between us, but I liked it. It felt silly and fragile and good.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“If you must fail," he said grandly, "fail spectacularly!”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“I knew there was something peculiar about you," she said. "And I mean that as the highest compliment.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“I realized that leaving wouldn't be like I had imagined, like casting off a weight. Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“They worried that I spent too much time alone, clinging to the notion that socializing was therapeutic. So was electroshock, I reminded them.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“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, amazon.com

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

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn't a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn't we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just another dusty fact in a book, sapped of mystery. 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…”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“What I believe is that when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. You are here for a reason -- and it's not to fail and die.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“The real purpose of money is to manipulate others and make them feel lesser than you.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“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…”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“A song and a smile from someone I cared about could be enough to distract me from all that darkness, if only for a little while.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“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, amazon.com

“I was here for a reason. There was something I was meant not simply to be, but to do- and it wasn't to run or hide or give up the minute things seemed terrifying and impossible.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com

“We aren’t so different. Outcasts and wanderers all—souls clinging to the margins of the world.”

— Ransom Riggs, amazon.com