1
You know, once, ” Robert said, “I was working in the shop, doing some repairs on a music box, and it was all going wrong. Da took me aside and told me to think of it like life: ‘It looks complicated when you see all the separate pieces, but the purpose of the music box is to play joyful music. You just have to remember how to fit them together so it will. The same with life really. It’s just about the living of it. That’s all you have, and all you can do: live and be happy.Peter Bunzl
2
The Kraken was somewhat obsessed with posture. As for Lily, she barely gave it a second thought. In her opinion it was better to read books than balance them. That’s what they were designed for, after all. And if you wanted to wear something on your head there was a perfectly good item designed for that too: it was called a hat.Peter Bunzl
3
No one conquers fear easily, Robert. It takes a brave heart to win great battles.Peter Bunzl
4
The soul’s a matter of the heart, Robert, and the heart’s a mystery even the greatest scientists don’t understand.Peter Bunzl
5
I know sometimes life can be painful, my tiger. But, remember, if you can’t change what’s happened today, you must bide your time, until you’re strong enough to fight tomorrow.Peter Bunzl
6
If you didn't divide it up, carve things into categories, it was all one in the same anyway - waves and oceans, dawns and sunsets, noise and silence. Life was a single connected river that ran through mechanicals, people, animals, planets. Everything that ever was or would be, all mixed together in a soup of being; of shouting and jumping, moving and bumping. Echoes of the great creation.Peter Bunzl
7
Samir loves Joe’s face. He studies it every day in class: a face as old as his own but already, in eighteen years, the cli s and hills and odd proportions of its geography have been shaped by life’s weather. Samir likes to observe the ever-watchful green eyes, hidden in their shadowy alcoves over the at nose and cheekbones, and the heavy brow that scrunches up with Joe’s moods — all those sculptural planes could have been carved by Easter Islanders. en there’s the pout of his lips, the pucker of their concentration or the twist of their anger. But most of all, Samir examines the thoughts as they cross the wide-open landscape of the face. Tries hard to read their cloud shapes from the merest shadow.Peter Bunzl
8
Samir loves Joe’s face. He studies it every day in class: a face as old as his own but already, in eighteen years, the cliffs and hills and odd proportions of its geography have been shaped by life’s weather. Samir likes to observe the ever-watchful green eyes, hidden in their shadowy alcoves over the at nose and cheekbones, and the heavy brow that scrunches up with Joe’s moods — all those sculptural planes could have been carved by Easter Islanders. en there’s the pout of his lips, the pucker of their concentration or the twist of their anger. But most of all, Samir examines the thoughts as they cross the wide-open landscape of the face. Tries hard to read their cloud shapes from the merest shadow.Peter Bunzl
9
Ryan had read half his book, listened to all his music, eaten two packets of biscuits and an apple, played seventy-two games of Donkey Kong, completing all the levels, and counted every Italian sports car they’d passed in the last hundred miles. Twenty-four hours of groggy sticky travel, twenty-four hours stuck in this overheated tin can on wheels, and he finally knew what it was like to be utterly and unendingly bored. He propped an elbow on the car window frame and stuck his arm out of the opening. Combing his hand through the slipstream, he let the cool air tickle his fingers as he watched the countryside stream past. .Peter Bunzl