Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a amazing book, I love it.
Even here - running for our lives, sleeping exposed, facing death - even here, in her arms, I was able to find some measure of peace.
Enoch O'Connor, dead-riser, born to a family of undertakers who couldn't understand why their clients kept walking away.
I haven't known you too long, but I feel I know your heart, and it's a strong, true thing—a peculiar heart—and I trust you.
Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, RUN! Bang, bang, BANG goes the farmer's gun He'll get by without his rabbit pie, so Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, RUN!
Why did we have more than we knew what to do with, while they had less than they needed to stay alive? I.
Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid..and wish you'd just stayed in bed?
Find the bird, find the loop, Yakob vai don't you understand you goddamned stupid yutzi.
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.
I hope I'll be able to come home, someday. But there are things I need to do first. I just want you to know I love you and Mom, and I'm not doing any of this to hurt you. We love you, too, Jake, and if it's drugs, or whatever it is, we don't care. We'll get you right again. Like I said, you're confused. No, Dad. I'm peculiar.
I expected as much from you, girl, said Caul. You're so typical of ymbryne-raised peculiars: no ambition, and no sense at all but one of entitlement. Quiet yourself, I am speaking to the male.
We kind of know there's no more frontiers in the physical world. So the frontiers move from where we haven't been yet to where we've been and abandoned.
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.
Flesh on the outside, metal on the inside.
Don't worry special Ed. There's always tomorrow.
So we rowed, our only hope that we could reach the mainland before nightfall reached us.
I didn't say EAT him!
The present seemed suddenly strange to me, so trivial and distracted. 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.
Suddenly I was cocooned in silent,blissful darkness,with only the whisper of distant waves to remind me where I was.
Los Angeles, which is where I live, happens to be a great place for junk. People have a lot of it, and they sell it and trade it: At these big swap meets, many, many hundreds of dealers of junk will descend upon a football field on a Saturday and sell all their stuff.
Oh, lovely. Improvised suicide.
Once this is over, I'll make you any promise you want.
Because we weren't like other people. We were peculiar.
I picked up the closest thing at hand—which happened to be a hand—and threw it. It bounced off the hollow's back, and the thing turned around to face me.
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.
There are peculiars all over the world," she said, "though our numbers are much diminished from what they once were.
Education never ends Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last. —The Adventure of the Red Circle On.
My parents treated me like a breakable heirloom, afraid to fight or fret in front of me least I shatter.
I don't know why it was so important for her to prove to a stranger that we were good-hearted, when we knew ourselves to be—but the suggestion that we were anything less than angels walking the earth, that our natures were more complexly shaded, seemed to bother her. They don't understand, she kept saying. Then again, I thought, maybe they do.
With each step and each turn, we threaded deeper inside a knot, one I feared we'd never work apart.
And it occurred 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.
Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.
He was lucky in a way. It wasn't long and drawn-out. No months in a hospital hooked up to machines.
Oggie sat facing us in a threadbare blazer and pajama bottoms, as if he'd been expecting company - just not pants-worthy company - and rocked endlessly in a plastic-covered easy chair as he talked.
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.
Only birds can manipulate time. Therefore, all time manipulators must be able to take the form of a bird.
I wanted to create characters who could do fantastic things but who weren't exactly superheros - characters who exist on sort of a spectrum from super-ability to disability.
I took the long way back, past the swaying lights of the harbor, the air heavy with brine and with chimney smoke from a hundred hearth fires.
I didn't say destiny, she said again. What I believe is that when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. You're here for a reason—and it's not to fail and die.
Munday, Dyson and Strype, attnys at law. Hated and feared since 1666.
Just because they knew it was lost didn't mean they know how to let it go.
It's trying to climb the wall, I said. Good God, it's like the freaking Terminator.
I just can't fathom this fame thing; I'm a total newbie.
She had tried to make herself like stone, but now the facade was falling away.
Those who escaped the noose settled here, at the very bottom, the absolute edge of peculiar society. Exiled from the outcasts of outcasts.
He was cross-examining my subconscious .
We have time.
What a peculiar lot you are, even for peculiars.
I could see tongues of dense fog licking over the ridge in the distance, where this world ended and the next one began, cold, damp, and sunless.
