The most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendents not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships, or being patronised by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it.

Many an ancient lord's last words have been, 'You can't kill me because I've got magic aaargh.'

People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

Granny Weatherwas was not a jouster in the lists of love, but, as an intelligent onlooker, she knew how the game was played.

I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.

No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.

So let's not get frightened when the children read fantasy. It's the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulate s the inquisitive nodes, and there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same reasons.