"Fire and Hemlock"

It was definitely not smart to stay up and rush through the ending, which only led to two hours of furious googling the next day to find out what really happened in the end. Naturally, now I wonder what other books by Diana Wynne Jones also have elaborate structures and deep symbolism that I completely missed.

• The penalty of being grown up was that you saw things like this photograph as they really were.
• Granny always made Polly think of biscuits. She had a dry, shortbread sort of way to her, with a hidden taste that came out afterwards.
• “Here they are,” Hero says, and puts the glasses into Mr. Piper’s hand. As Mr. Piper fumbles them on to his nose, Hero explains, “I picked them up and kept them. I knew you’d manage better if you didn’t have to keep explaining you weren’t really seeing a giant.”
• There were two great black cases that looked as battered as the piano, but when Polly opened them she found a cello nestling inside each, brown and shiny as a conker in its shell, and obviously even more precious than conkers.
• “Yes there are,” she contradicted Mr. Lynn. “It’s like those vases. Now-here and Nowhere.”
• Mr. Lynn was rubbing its nose and calling it soothing bad names. “You cartload of cat’s meat,” she heard him say. “Mindless dog food. They’ll eat you in Belgium for less than this.”
• This was one of the queer things about divorce which Polly could not have described to Nina—the way Mum said this kind of thing to her that she would normally have said to Dad instead.
• Then she had second thoughts. Heroes do not fight for themselves, but for other people.
• Polly sat sort of recovering too. Ordinary feelings began coming back like pins and needles.
• She was so happy that she had gone quiet all over. She felt like someone listening to great chords of music that were not to be interrupted by speaking.
• “Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look.”
• Both of them were losing count of the times they had been friends and then not friends.
• But when the time came and the orchestra started the clown music, a sort of steely goodness came upon Polly. She suddenly knew she was going to be excellent.
• She was so bleached through by her uneasiness
• She liked that even better almost than the moments when Sam or Ed would gasp, “Put your back in it, Tom!” and the music suddenly widened until it seemed amazing that only four of them were making it.
• As Granny remarked when Polly introduced her to Fiona, both their figures were a pinch of faith, a spoonful of charity, and the rest entirely hope.
• She had superstition written all through her like the words in seaside rock.
• Tom wishes you, for some reason I can’t understand, to consider the human back. He says there are many other matters you should consider too, but that was a particularly glaring example. He invites you, he says, to walk along a beach this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves. There you will see backs—backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt. You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair. This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles and midge bites and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh. In fact, he defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers. <> I hope you know what all this is about, because I don’t. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can. Yours ever, Sam
• Polly had done things, true, but it had all been without shape, as if she had been filleted away from her own motives and the things which gave her shape.
• something Tom had said himself: that being a hero means ignoring how silly you feel. She had let Laurel embarrass her into a state in which she could not even think straight.
• She had been prepared to be cool and alert and collected, and it was all overthrown by her utter delight at seeing him again. to burst into wild, joyful laughter.
• she found they were travelling along beside the sea. White surf was folding and smashing almost beside the rails, and a myriad dazzles flickered off the grey water stretching towards the sun.
• Seb, to do him justice, made no attempt to bluster or pretend. “But it was between me and him,” he said. “It always was. And Tom used you too. Surely you understand, Polly! If they don’t take him, they’ll take me instead.”
• Two sides to Nowhere, Polly thought. One really was a dead end. The other was the void that lay before you when you were making up something new out of ideas no one else had quite had before.
• To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much.
• “Yes, and if it’s not true nowhere, it has to be somewhere.” Polly laughed and held out her hands. “We’ve got her, either way.” Tom