I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.

Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.

I sit in my treeI sing like the birdsMy beak is my penMy songs are my poems.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

The season of evil," I echoed. "Protect your soul.

Look at all the life in this," she said. "Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity."I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers."Just imagine," she said. "If every seed grew, there'd be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees.

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?"I said nothing."What colour's a blackbird?" she said."Black""Typical!

There's light and joy, but there's also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.

Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house. "What on earth will you be doing with something so large?" said Mum."I shall live in it with my servants, of course," said Mina. "Or I shall establish a school.""A school, my lady?""Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.

Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.

The beauties of the North seemed to be intensified by the loss we had experienced there, and they drew us back to them.

We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.We let the stars shine into us.

We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.

And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds.

It's called evolution. You must know that. Yes, we are.'She looked up from her book.'I would hope, though,' she went on, 'that we also have some rather more beautiful ancestors. Don't you?' --Mina

Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and . . . Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and . . . And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling . . . paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody.

It was great to see the owls," I said.She smiled."Yes. They're wild things, of course. Killers, savages. They're wonderful.

A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.

I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It's dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep in the room next door.

Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.I turn my face towards it and I laugh.Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make Mina mad.I laugh again.Some people think that she's already mad, I think.

The dead are often known to eat 27 and 53

I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs.

In the end she just said..... All I did was to run away for a few minutes! All I wanted was to be free!

She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became cold and short and dark. Living things hid themselves away. Spring came when she was released and made her slow way up to the world again. The world became brighter and bolder in order to welcome her back. It began to be filled with warmth and light. The animals dared to wake, they dared to have their young. Plants dared to send out buds and shoots. Life dared to come back.

What is the purpose of living if there are no perils to be encountered and overcome?