I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.

Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then — and this is the important bit — do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies.

How many people want to read about three disreputable pigs and a dopey wolf with a disposition towards house demolition?

Librarying is a harder profession than the public realizes, he said. People think it's all rubber stamps, knowing that Dewey 521 is celestial mechanics and saying 'Try looking under fiction' sixty eight times a day.

I loved him, officer. More than any woman ever loved an egg.

Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.

You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.