Bartimaeus Quotes

#1. Home. His whereabouts was unknown. Since Mandrake knew nothing about what his djinni had discovered, and since summoning the injured Bartimaeus immediately might well destroy

Jonathan Stroud

#2. The boy was silent as we went. Unsurprising, this - he had seldom left London in his life before. I guessed him to be gazing about in dumbstruck admiration.
"What an appalling place," he [Nathaniel] said. - Bartimaeus

Jonathan Stroud

#3. I rather think he knew anyway.

Jonathan Stroud

#4. Hey, we've all got problems, chum. I'm overly talkative. You look like a field of buttercups in a suit.

Jonathan Stroud

#5. Big don't mean ugly, and thin sho don't mean pretty. If a person wants to be pretty, they gotta walk pretty, talk pretty and act pretty. Can't nobody take pretty from you.

Daniel Black

#6. The object that was pinning me haplessly to the ground, like a butterfly on a collector's tray, was of twentieth-century origin and of very specific function.
Oh, all right, it was a public lavatory.

Jonathan Stroud

#7. Hippo in a skirt: this was a comic reference to one of Solomon's principal wives, the one from Moab. Childish? Yes. But in the days before printing we had limited opportunities for satire.

Jonathan Stroud

#8. Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.

Jonathan Stroud

#9. It's the same with spirit guises; show me a sweet little choirboy or a smiling mother and I'll show you the hideous fanged strigoi it really is. (Not always. Just sometimes. *Your* mother is absolutely fine, for instance. Probably.)

Jonathan Stroud

#10. Freedom is an illusion. It always comes at a price.

Jonathan Stroud

#11. He was transfixed at the sight of the lords and ladies of his realm running about like demented chickens.

Jonathan Stroud

#12. The mole dug its way deep, deep down, under the foundations of the wall. No magical alarm sounded, though I did hit my head five times on a pebble.
Once each on five different pebbles. Not the same pebble five times. Just want to make that clear. Sometimes you human beings are so dense.

Jonathan Stroud

#13. According to some, heroic deaths are admirable things. I've never been convinced by this argument, mainly because, no matter how cool, stylish, composed, unflappable, manly, or defiant you are, at the end of the day you're also dead. Which is a little too permanent for my liking.

Jonathan Stroud

#14. There was a devotion to detail here that could only come with genuine affection, perhaps even with love.

Jonathan Stroud

#15. John Mandrake was an attractive young man, and the scent of power hung about him, sweet and intoxicating, like honeysuckle in the evening air.

Jonathan Stroud

#16. It was Nathaniel's boundless capacity for stating the obvious that made him so charmingly human.

Jonathan Stroud

#17. Despite his crimped shirts and flowing mane (or perhaps because of them) I had seen no evidence as yet that Nathaniel even knew what a girl was. If he'd ever met one, chances are they'd both have run screaming in opposite directions.

Jonathan Stroud

#18. To my astonishment I saw him standing at a table with Kitty Jones. It was the Kitty Jones bit that was astonishing. Not the table. Though it was very nicely polished.

Jonathan Stroud

#19. Thus, those with long and glittering careers (e.g. me) tend to look down on those (e.g. Ascobol) whose names have been unearthed more recently, and haven't amassed so many fine achievements.

Jonathan Stroud

#20. That's usually how they start, the young ones. Meaningless waffle.

Jonathan Stroud

#21. What was it that drew you back? My marvellous personality, I suppose? Or my sparkling conversation?

Jonathan Stroud

#22. Isn't it hard to maintain an argument when you can read each other's mind?

Jonathan Stroud

#23. In my youth, I was always one for the dramatic entrance. Now, in keeping with my character, I gravitate more toward the subtle and refined. Okay, with the occasional feathered serpent thrown in.

Jonathan Stroud

#24. When I set out from the boy's attic window, my head was so full of competing plans and complex stratagems that I didn't look where I was going and flew straight into a chimney.
Something symbolic in that. It's what fake freedom does for you.

Jonathan Stroud

#25. Oh, the boots were on the other eight feet now.

Jonathan Stroud

#26. A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.

Jonathan Stroud

#27. Besides, if you're going to die horribly, you might as well do it with style.

Jonathan Stroud

#28. One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror.

Jonathan Stroud

#29. The Amulet of Samarkand. It was Simon Lovelace's. Now it is yours. Soon it will be Simon Lovelace's again. Take it and enjoy the consequences.

Jonathan Stroud

#30. I - though forced through lack of space to assume the form of a stoic guinea pig crouched between the girl's shoe and the glove compartment - was my usual dignified self.

Jonathan Stroud