A | B-C | Da | Do-E | Fa-Fo | Fr-Ho | Hu | I | L | M | O-Pe | Pl-R | S | T-W
Quotes by Subject | Home
<Subjects: B-C>
Page numbers in parentheses are for the rereleased editions.
- “Events are intertwined in ways we cannot always see, Cassie. Sometimes small things can make huge differences.” ~ Ms. Paloma, history teacher, Book #7 pg. 134
- Warning: Spoilers for rerelease from this point to the next section.
- “Sometimes smaller is better.” ~ Cassie, MM#1 pg. 164
- “Sometimes children can accomplish amazing things.” ~ Elfangor, AC pg. ix
- <Maybe we should try to channel the Helmacron personality,> Tobias suggested. <They aren’t afraid of being small.>
<Maybe they think small is scary,> Cassie said.
<Then they’re going to be terrified of us.>
<Now what?>
<Let’s try to reason with them first,> Jake said.
<Oh, yeah.> I laughed. <That will work.>
<We don’t want them shooting Dracon beams if we can avoid it,> Jake said. <And Tobias, watch those blades.>
We marched forward until we were standing right beneath the Helmacrons. They paid us zero attention.
Jake addressed them. <Surrender now! Surrender, and we’ll let you live as our defiled beasts of burden. Resist us and—and we’ll sneeze in your general direction!>
<Very original,> Tobias whispered.
<You call that reasoning?>
<Reasoning Helmacron-style,> Jake explained.
[Book #42 pg. 63]
- “Amazing, a kid’s capacity to ignore the bizarre.” ~ Tobias, Book #49 pg. 89
- “Adults are too reality-bound. It’s too hard for them to suspend disbelief. Even when the new reality hits them in the face.” ~ Marco, Book 50 pg. 43
Page numbers in parentheses are for the rereleased editions.
- “I guess you never really know someone till you see them scared. And even scared to death, with tears running down her face, Rachel had strength to spare.” ~ Jake, Book #1 pg. 39
- “Don’t mess with me. You may be bigger than me, you may scare me, you may make me run away, but if I have to I am ready to fight.” ~ Rachel, Book #2 pg. 82
- Warning: Spoilers for rerelease from this point to the next section.
- “There’s only one way to deal with fear: Be afraid. Be afraid, and then go ahead and do what you have to do, anyway.” ~ Tobias, MM#1 pg. 219
- “The thing about fear is you can’t be afraid of it. I know that sounds confusing. I guess what I mean is, be afraid if you have to, right? Fear is like this vicious little worm that lives inside you and eats you alive. You have to fight it. You have to know it’s there. You have to accept that you’ll never get rid of it, but fight it just the same. Brave isn’t about not being afraid. It’s about being scared to death and still not giving in.” ~ Rachel, Book #12 pg. 2
Page numbers in parentheses are for the rereleased editions.
- “As long as you have me and the others, you aren’t lost, Tobias.” ~ Rachel, Book #3 pg. 90
- Warning: Spoilers for rerelease from this point to the next section.
- “It’s when Cassie isn’t talking about animals and Marco and Rachel aren’t teasing each other that you have to worry.” ~ Jake, Book #11 pg. 112
- “Can someone interpret from Marco-babble to normal language?” ~ Tobias, Book #14 pg. 26
- “And that’s when I dumped a bucket of water on Marco’s head and we all went home.” ~ Cassie, Book #14 pg. 166
- “Exactly, Rachel. Eggs-ACT-lee. Zactly. We arrived back at the precise moment when we were snatched away. We were all yanked away at the same moment, so naturally we all arrived back at the same moment. Yanked. Yanked is a strange word. Yank. Yank-kut.”
“Yeah,” Marco said. “That’s what’s strange: the word ‘yanked.’ Us turning into mosquitoes to suck some guys blood so we could morph into him and instead ending up in the middle of some war to control psychic yellow frogs, and oh, by the way, blowing up a small continent full of Yeerks, saving an entire species, then getting back here to find out Coma-man woke up from a mosquito bite delivered by a morphed alien-slash-deer-slash-scorpion-slash-four-eyed centaur, that’s all totally normal. That’s just an average day. Dear Diary: another boring average day, till someone said ‘yanked.’”
I recognized his tone. Sarcasm. It is a form of humor. So I laughed using mouth-sounds.
“Hah. Hah-hah. Hah. Hah.” I considered, then added, “Hah.”
Prince Jake, Cassie, Marco, Rachel, and Tobias, in his own human morph, all stared at me.
“What was that?” Rachel demanded.
“I laughed.”
“Don’t...don’t do that, Ax,” Prince Jake said. “It’s disturbing somehow.”
“Yes, Prince Jake.”
“Don’t call me prince.”
“I will call you ‘The Jake formerly known as Prince.’”
Marco made a horrified face. “Oh, no. Now he’s making jokes. Bad, bad jokes.”
“Actually that was my joke,” Prince Jake said stiffly. “Oh, fine. I get it. You can’t laugh at my jokes. Okay. Great. I don’t even care.”
I was an Andalite, all alone, far, far, from home. Far from my own people. Except that sometimes your own people are not just the ones who look like you. Sometimes the people who are your own can be very different from you.
“Can we eat cinnamon buns now?” I asked hopefully. “Bun-zuh?”
[Book #18 pg. 159]
- “Marco,” I said, once I had demorphed. “You know you’re a toad?”
“Kiss me and I’ll become a prince,” he said without hesitation. “I’ll be the Prince Formerly Known As Toad. You know you want me. You can’t help it. After all, you’re a female and I’m...well, I’m me.”
“Yeah, that’s the real Marco,” I said dryly.
Cassie laughed. “Believe me, we all did the same kind of thing. I asked him to tell me what it was like when we morphed trout. Just to test his memory.”
“And I answered that it wasn’t bad except the cracker-crumb coating chafed a little and I was allergic to tarter sauce. Now can you all stop playing that game? I’m afraid I’ll miss a punch line and Rachel will morph to grizzly and eat me before I have a chance to say anything.”
[Book #22 pg. 52]
- “Wasn’t it Journey to the Bottom of the Sea?” Marco asked.
“No, it was Voyage,” Jake confirmed.
“Journey sounds better,” Marco said.
Jake sighed. “Hey, time marches on, right? We’re in a hurry. What are you thinking, Cassie?”
“Calamari,” she said with a grin.
“Snails?” I said, frowning.
<I am not in favor of snails,> Ax said.
“Wait, that’s not—” Cassie said loudly.
<I had the misfortune to inadvertently eat one while feeding,> Ax continued. <I did not see it in time. I stepped on it and digested it.>
“You ate a snail through your hoof?” I asked. That picture temporarily replaced the image of me being squashed to the size of a Barbie doll on the ocean floor.
<Yes, and the meat portion was fine. However, once the snail’s body had been digested, the shell was very difficult to—>
“Ooookay, I think that’s probably enough about snails,” Jake said.
“Yeah, especially since calamari does not mean snail,” Cassie pointed out. “Escargot means snail. I was talking about—”
<I have an idea: Let’s all just stick to speaking English,> Tobias grumped.
“Squid!” Cassie yelled suddenly. The birds in the trees around us fell silent. So did we.
Until Tobias said, <Uh-uh. Calamari is octopus, not squid.>
“Oh. Who. CARES?” Cassie cried. “Squid. We can morph a giant squid! Giant squid dive really deep. And they have arms, so we could maybe get into the Pemalite ship.”
I met Marco’s gaze. “Why didn’t she just say that to begin with?”
“Could have saved a lot of time,” Marco agreed, playing along.
<What does any of this have to do with your Captain Nemo?> Ax wondered.
Cassie threw up her hands. “It’s a book. Journey to—”
“Ah HAH! It was Journey!”
“I mean Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” Cassie grated. “Captain Nemo was attacked by a giant squid.”
“Who won?” Marco asked.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “It wasn’t Journey or Voyage. It was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne.”
Cassie looked like she might strangle me. Then she said, “Oh yeah. Voyage was a TV show. They run it on the Sci-Fi channel.”
“I thought it was on Nick at Night,” Marco said.
At which point everyone started giggling.
“Someone call the Chee and tell them they’re doomed,” I said. “Their only hope is a collection of idiot kids, standing around in the woods debating cable channels.”
[Book #27 pg. 65]
- “I’m glad you’re okay, Tobias. I hate it when you don’t get taken prisoner with us.” ~ Rachel, Book #36 pg. 118
- “Ax,” Cassie said. “I think you have what is commonly known as a crush.”
<A what?>
“A feeling that makes it hard for you to see the truth, if the truth is unpleasant,” she explained.
“Yeah, you know, like the way Cassie can’t see that Jake is really just a pinhead,” Marco said.
Prince Jake threw a horse comb at Marco that Marco dodged. Marco and Prince Jake are best friends. This sort of behavior appears to be typical of male friendships.
[Book #38 pg. 26]
- “These are my people. Anyone who believes in freedom, anyone who resists tyranny, anyone who pursues peace is ‘my people.’ Andalite, Hork-Bajir, or human.” ~ Ax, Book #38 pg. 127
- “Loyalty is all there is.” ~ Tobias, Book #40 pg. 83
- <This thing is massive,> Cassie said. <It’s...it’s too big to be real.>
<It’s a Nimitz class. Biggest warships in the world. Built by Newport News Shipbuilding Company, out of Virginia.>
<Jake?> Rachel cocked the seagull’s head. <Do you have a life?>
[Book #46 pg. 43]
- “‘Home’ meant more to me than just my scoop and the surrounding landscape. Home meant my fellow warriors. All of them.” ~ Ax, Book #46 pg. 117
- I thumped my feet on the floor. “Uh-ur-ulph.”
Tobias turned. <Did you say something, Marco?>
“Uh-ur-ulph. UH. UR. ULPH!”
Ax looked at me. Tilted his head. <I believe Marco is trying to tell us that while he is extremely happy to see us, he enjoys being trussed up, and could we please not remove the filthy satchel from his mouth, as he finds it quite tasty.>
Oh, good. Ax picks now to finally get human sarcasm.
<Yeah.> Tobias nodded. <That’s what I though he said.>
[Book #51 pg. 142]
- I said, “Cassie, you guessed that letting Tom take the morphing cube might weaken rather than strengthen the Yeerks. You guessed that Ax was...” I stifled the most bitter that came to mind. “...conflicted. I’ll back your guess any day of the week.”
“I think he means he’s sorry he doubted you and treated you like crap,” Rachel said archly.
“Yeah. That’s exactly what I mean. Come on, Cassie, show me where to go next.”
[Book #53 pg. 70]
- “Well, if it isn’t Lobster Boy.”
<Hey, Jake. Remember this morph?>
“Uh-huh. Some reason why you’re morphing to lobster?”
<Ummmm...I dropped my keys down in the pool? I was going to go get them?>
“Well, then it’s a good thing you have the ability to turn into a lobster, because otherwise, what would you do? I mean, normal people, they drop their keys in the pool, they’re just totally helpless. Those keys stay down there. Forever.”
I stopped the morph before I lost my eyes and began to reverse it. As soon as I had a mouth I said, “You seem perky, today. You want something to drink?”
“What are you going to do, morph a cow and squeeze me out a glass of two percent?”
[Book #54 pg. 130]
Page numbers in parentheses are for the rereleased editions.
- Warning: Spoilers for rerelease from this point to the next section.
- “Yes. It’s definitely one of those two choices.” ~ Ax, Book #11 pg. 79
- “Do what’s right. Forget about what anybody thinks. Do what’s right.” ~ Jake, Book #15 pg. 151
- “I guess sometimes you have to choose between smart, sane ruthlessness, and totally stupid, insane hope. You can’t just pick one and stick with it, either. Each time it comes up, you have to try and make your best decision. Most of the time, I guess I have to go with being smart and sane. But I don’t want to live in a world where people don’t try the stupid, crazy, hopeful thing sometimes.” ~ Jake, Book #19 pg. 145
- “That is a highly unacceptable number of maybes.” ~ Ax, Book #21 pg. 141
- “Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective.” ~ Ax, Book #38 pg. 51
- “In reality life seldom comes in simple shades of black and white. The choices in the real world, the choices we most often face, are all in shades of gray.” ~ Ax, Book #38 pg. 84
- “Every choice is yours. Always has been. You were and are free.” ~ Tobias, Book #41 pg. 124
- <We’ve got to swim,> Jake said.
<Fine,> I agreed. <But which way?>
<Toward the heart,> Cassie said.
<Which is—?> I asked.
<Above the liver,> Cassie said.
<Who said you were directionally challenged?>
About a dozen tunnels went up to the left and up to the right. One tunnel seemed to go straight up.
<Eenie, meenie, minie, moe?> Ax said.
<You really have been on Earth too long,> I told him. <You’ll never fit in on the Andalite home world now.>
<I would miss Saturday morning cartoons,> Ax said.
[Book #42 pg. 102]
- “There is always a choice. In any and every situation. It’s usually the choice between bad and worse. But it’s still a choice.” ~ Tobias, Book #43 pg. 116
- “Things happen fast. You just have to make the best decision you can and then go for it.” ~ Rachel, Book #43 pg. 134
- “What would Elfangor do?” ~ Ax, Book #52 pg. 78
- “So, who’s going to key the detonator?”
“Coin toss,” Cassie said quickly.
<What?>
“It’s the way we make most major decisions,“ Marco said dryly. “First, you choose heads or tails. Then you toss a coin. Whatever side is faceup when the coin lands is winner.”
The procedure was simple enough. But I could not help but think if this was the methodology by which humans made most of their major decisions.... Well, it explained much.
[Book #52 pg. 135]
Have a favorite character, book, or quote? Fill out my survey and share your thoughts!
Find an error on my site or have a suggestion or comment? You can fill out my feedback form here.
All pictures and books copyrighted by Scholastic, Inc. Books by K.A. Applegate, and pictures by David B. Mattingly.
