Joan Aiken Quotes

#1. Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement.

Joan Aiken

#2. Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.

Joan Aiken

#3. The first book that a child reads has a colossal impact.

Joan Aiken

#4. A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience.

Joan Aiken

#5. No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.

Joan Aiken

#6. Trees are swayed by winds, men by words.

Joan Aiken

#7. Since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

Joan Aiken

#8. As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint.

Joan Aiken

#9. But this is your home'
'Not any longer, my poppet. Women make nests but men make bequests and scatter them. Heigh-ho!

Joan Aiken

#10. Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it.

Joan Aiken

#11. Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them.

Joan Aiken

#12. Her smile was like a swift light passing across a darkened room.
("Hair")

Joan Aiken

#13. Eat an apple,sing a song,
Don't touch a snake as it wriggles along.
Run for an hour, walk for a day,
Hark to the birds and heed what they say.

Joan Aiken

#14. The silence behind her was closing and thickening, and becoming coloured, like water into which a brilliant dye is being poured

Joan Aiken