Geraldine McCaughrean Quotes

America to me is so varied and exciting. I always feel nostalgia for the place I'm not in, and then I get there and find myself in a traffic jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I think, 'God, why was I romanticizing this part of the country?' I think it has to do with the romantic, unrealistic temperament.

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.

My lack of access to the real world has been replaced completely by books, and it can’t be healthy to live in a land of happily ever afters.

I loved something I made up

That was all and it was enough for me: fantasies are better left fantasies.

When I was younger - it might be a romantic idea - I always thought I might go crazy.

Nothing else ever mattered to me, and you weren’t even real. All I ever wanted was you.

I like the rain before it falls. of course there is no such thing, she said. That's why it's my favorite. Something can still make you happy, can't it, even if it isn't real.

And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.

And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?

I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

Magic is what we invent when we want something we think we cant have.

Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams.

No tribute is laid on castles in the air.

You can do anything when it's not real.

I've just been imagining that it was really me you wanted after all and that I was to stay here for ever and ever. It was a great comfort while it lasted. But the worst of imagining things is that the time comes when you have to stop and that hurts.

The trouble with you and me, is that we don't live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.

You see, Dash -- I was never the girl in your head. And you were never the boy in my head. I think we both knew that. It's only when we try to make the girl or boy in our head real that the true trouble comes. I did that with Carlos, and it was a bad failure. Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head.

None of it seems real. Who knows? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s actually happening to someone else. Maybe it’s something I imagined. Maybe soon I’m going to wake up and find everything fixed with Lissa and Dimitri. We’ll all be together, and he’ll be there to smile and hold me and tell me everything ‘s going to be okay. Maybe all of this really has been a dream. But I don’t think so.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine.

Paris is my favorite place in the world. I've never been there, at all... But I wanna live there, even though I've never been.

Please," she whispered as she opened the book, "please get me out of here just for an hour or so, please take me far, far away

Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.