Ransom Riggs Quotes:

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. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss.

source: - "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children". Book by Ransom Riggs, 2011.

Topics: Dream, Home, Escaping

Sometimes it's better not to look back.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2011). “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children”, p.321, Quirk Books

Topics: Looks, Sometimes

If I'd kept my heart better armored, where would I be now?

source: - Ransom Riggs (2014). “Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children”, p.140, Quirk Books

Topics: Heart, My Heart

Sometimes you just need to go through a door.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2011). “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children”, p.86, Quirk Books

Topics: Doors, Needs, Sometimes

Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2014). “Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children”, p.348, Quirk Books

Topics: Wonder, Now And Then, Divulge

Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.

Topics: Mean, Laughing, Care

What I believe when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. You are here for a reason - and it's not to fail and die.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2014). “Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children”, p.49, Quirk Books

Topics: Believe, Everything Happens For A Reason, Failing, Happens For A Reason

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2014). “Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children”, p.99, Quirk Books

Topics: Form, Myth

If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.

Topics: Memories, Home, Missing, Bad Memories, Friendless

There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2011). “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children”, p.11, Quirk Books

Topics: Girl, Brother, Boys

I've never really been interested in the vintage photos people pay lots of money for -- civil war tintypes or old daguerrotypes of famous people. Nor do I have any interest in the really gross, dark stuff that some people pay top-dollar, like post-mortem photos of babies (yuck) or press photos of old murder scenes or whatever. I collect in these little niches most other people don't care about -- dark-and-weird-but-fun -- and photos that have been written on, which a lot of sellers think hurts their value. All of which is good news for me!

source: - Source: www.thisisyesterday.com

Topics: Baby, Hurt, Fun, Yuck, Sellers

I never remember nice dreams; only the bad ones stick.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2014). “Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children”, p.59, Quirk Books

Topics: Dream, Nice, Sticks

I was here for a reason. There was something I was meant not simply to be, but to do- and it wasn't to run or hide or give up the minute things seemed terrifying and impossible.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2014). “Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children”, p.105, Quirk Books

Topics: Running, Giving Up, Impossible

I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting

Topics: Girl, Flirting, Trying

Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid and wish you'd just stayed in bed?

Topics: Climbing, Finding Yourself, Wish

I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn't a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn't we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2014). “Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children”, p.184, Quirk Books

Topics: Ideas, Abundance, Deficiency

If you must fail ... fail spectacularly!

Topics: Failure, Failing

I own a few thousand snapshots, which is small by the standards of most collectors I know. I generally only buy photos I think I may actually be able to use in a book one day. I need that focus when buying, because without it I'd just buy everything and my house would be overrun with bucket loads of snapshots; there are just too many beautiful images in the world, and I'd need to own them all.

Topics: Beautiful, Book, Thinking, Beautiful Images

Whenever I try to map things out they inevitably change. Which doesn't mean I don't map them out — I just try to embrace the better ideas that come along as my fingers are flying around the keyboard mid-draft!

Topics: Mean, Ideas, Flying

When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2011). “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children”, p.82, Quirk Books

Topics: Knocking

We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.

Topics: Believe, Fairy Tale, Fairy

Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of these ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries - but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.

Topics: Life, Stars, Light, Points Of Light

It's easy to say you don't care about money when you have plenty of it.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2011). “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children”, p.55, Quirk Books

Topics: Care, Easy

Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.

Topics: Girl, Baby, War, Swimsuits, Weird Stuff

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2011). “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children”, p.9, Quirk Books

Topics: Forever, Would Be, Half, Before And After

There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just another dusty fact in a book, sapped of mystery. So maybe it was better to leave a few spots on the map blank. To let the world keep a little of its magic, rather than forcing it to divulge every last secret. Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

source: - "Hollow City". Book by Ransom Riggs, January 14, 2014.

Topics: Life, Book, Romance, Divulge, Better Now

Our debt was too great and the words thank you too small.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2014). “Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children”, p.34, Quirk Books

Topics: Life, Debt, Small Life

I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2011). “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children”, p.9, Quirk Books

Topics: Born, Century, Cheated

Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2014). “Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children”, p.140, Quirk Books

Topics: Dream, Strange, Nightmare, Dreams And Nightmares

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.

Topics: Would Be, Ordinary, Accepting

But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around-they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late.

Topics: Monday, Book, Years, Tentacles, Scary Books

I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don't know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism.

source: - Ransom Riggs (2012). “Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past”, p.4, Harper Collins

Topics: Growing Up, Kids, Florida, South Florida, Kids Growing Up

I grew up feeling like a weirdo like many kids do. But I was lucky to find my own home for peculiar children. I went to a school for the gifted in Florida, and it was full of kids who - we were all strange together. And that was a real blessing.

Topics: Children, Real, Home

My portal to another world was fiction.

source: - "Author Ransom Riggs Talks Bringing ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ To The Big Screen". Hollywood.com Interview, www.hollywood.com.

Topics: Another World

Some of my favorite photos from the old days are of people who maybe didn't know how to smile. Maybe smiling in photos wasn't an accepted form of behavior back then. But the big eyes and the oversized dolls that people are carrying, and it's something about their hair - the anachronisms of these photos are really what creep me out.

Topics: Anachronism, Old Days, Big Eyes