Mischief Quotes

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“Give her hell from us, Peeves.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“Loki'd!”
― Tom Hiddleston

“There's nothing more contagious than the laughter of young children; it doesn't even have to matter what they're laughing about.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I promise I will repay you.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked, looking at him, with his bare feet and plain, dark clothes. “With what?”
The smile stayed on his lips. “Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of things long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”
― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Tell me that the purpose of life is to have fun, and without a care in the world I'll begin wreaking havoc on everything I pass. Now that's what I call pure, honest fun.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“He doesn't need my help coming up with pranks. He's got too many ideas of his own.
- Daja referring to Briar in their first year at Discipline cottage”
― Tamora Pierce, Tris's Book

“The storm ate up September’s cry of despair, delighted at its mischief, as all storms are.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“The place had enormous possibilities. He realized that at once. The stream, of course, was perfect for sailing toy boats, for skipping stones, and, in the event of failing inspiration, for falling into. Several of the trees appeared to have been specifically designed for climbing, and one huge, white old birch overhanging the stream promised the exhilarating combination of climbing a tree and falling into the water, all at one time.”
― David Eddings, Guardians of the West

“We have all at one time been stranded on islands shouting lies across the seas of misunderstanding, hoping the fog will carry our mischief to the distant ports in people’s minds.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“One mischief always introduces another.”
― Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

“I've always been the clown and mischief maker of the family; I've always had to pay double for my sins: once with scoldings and then again with my own sense of despair. I'm no longer satisfied with the meaningless affection or the supposedly serious talks.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“A book is a mysterious object," I said, "and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen. All kinds of mischief can be caused, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. For better or for worse, it’s completely out of your control.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find every pathography unsavory. This attitude is excused with the reproach that from a pathographic elaboration of a great man one never obtains an understanding of his importance and his attainments, that it is therefore useless mischief to study in him things which could just as well be found in the first comer. However, this criticism is so clearly unjust that it can only be grasped when viewed as a pretext and a disguise for something. As a matter of fact pathography does not aim at making comprehensible the attainments of the great man; no one should really be blamed for not doing something which one never promised. The real motives for the opposition are quite different. One finds them when one bears in mind that biographers are fixed on their heroes in quite a peculiar manner. Frequently they take the hero as the object of study because, for reasons of their personal emotional life, they bear him a special affection from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization which strives to enroll the great men among their infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, the infantile conception of the father. For the sake of this wish they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his life's struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything of human weakness or imperfection; they then give us a cold, strange, ideal form instead of the man to whom we could feel distantly related. It is to be regretted that they do this, for they thereby sacrifice the truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature.”
― Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood

“Little queen,' Madoc says with a crooked smile. Despite not sharing blood with Oak, the mischief in his expression is familiar. 'All grown up and come to devour your maker. I can't say as I blame you.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“There was a nebulous, infectious energy to her, as if she were somehow more *alive* than everyone else. As if all her nerves were sparking at once, just below the surface.”
― Katharine McGee, American Royals

“May God deliver us from mischief.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“She insisted that they focus their energies on raising a little girl who was, by nature, a tangle of mischief and motion and curiosity.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“If you are not smiling, mischievous, satirical for some time every day, you are not living. Laugh out loud.”
― Sandeep Sahajpal, The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be!

“Over and over again we find the Church councils complaining that the peasants (and sometimes the priests too) were singing 'wicked songs with a chorus of dancing women,' or holding 'ballads and dancings and evil and wanton songs and such-like lures of the devil'; over and over again the bishops forbade these songs and dances; but in vain. In every country in Europe, right through the Middle Ages to the time of the Reformation, and after it, country folk continued to sing and dance in the churchyard. Two hundred years after Charlemagne's death there grew up the legend of the dancers of Kölbigk, who danced on Christmas Eve in the churchyard, in spite of the warning of the priest, and all got rooted to the spot for a year, till the Archbishop of Cologne released them. Some men say that they were not rooted standing to the spot, but that they had to go on dancing for the whole year; and that before they were released they had danced themselves waist-deep into the ground. People used to repeat the little Latin verse which they were singing:
...
Through the leafy forest, Bovo went a-riding
And his pretty Merswind trotted on beside him--
Why are we standing still? Why can't we go away?”
― Eileen Power, Medieval People

“Spring is the mischief in me”
― Robert Frost, North of Boston

“What do you want to hear? I am sure you want to hear some praises, the one who does mischievous deeds loves to get praised by the most unpleasant negative comments to nourish one's ego.”
― Noha Alaa El-Din, It's Hard to Please Vandanya: The Suitcase

“Such a wonderful face, their mother's. As a younger woman she'd been beautiful than Laurel, more so than any of her daughters, with the possible exception of Daphne. She certainly wouldn't have had directors pushing her towards character roles. But one thing you could bank on was that beauty- the sort that came with youth- didn't last, and their mother had grown old. Her skin had sagged, spots had appeared, along with mysterious puckers and discolorations; her bones had seemed to subside as the rest of her shrank and her hair frayed to nothing. But still that face remained, every aspect bright with mischief, even now. Her eyes, though tired, had the glint of one who never stopped expecting to be amused, and her mouth turned up at the corners as if she'd just remembered a joke. It was the sort of face that drew strangers, that enchanted them and made them want to know her better. The way she had of making you feel, with a slight twitch of the jaw, that she too had suffered as you did, that everything would be better now simply for having come within her orbit: that was her real beauty - her presence, her joy, her magnetism. That, and her splendid appetite for make-believe.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“If she hadn’t had so much responsibility to keep her busy, she might have been the kind of child that drives schoolteachers into nervous breakdowns and invents the delightful schemes and plays for which somebody else always seems to get in trouble. Even so, she still got into scrapes sometimes, mainly daring the cowboys to do madcap riding stunts or putting pepper in the coffee of somebody who didn’t have the sense of humor to appreciate it.”
― Elisabeth Grace Foley, Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories

“Presuming that these details be taken into account, I may have more precisely – and perhaps interestingly – utilized a visual comparative to their singularity's emordnilap instead. If not for said rodents generally behaving with even greater stealth than Natalie's recent approach to her brother's birthday, thereby making it a particularly difficult exercise in which to envisage an apt sample of their total.

If for instance, I'd suggested that, "This should require roughly as number the rats that one might reasonably expect to find gadding about inside an abandoned, yet abundantly stockpiled grain and cheese warehouse,” you might likewise consider it instructive to discover that their population in this very case would not only offset the number of stars by that which my initial estimation left me short; but easily swell to a surplus by again as much, given that a single pair of the noted grain and dairy connoisseurs can propagate as many as 15,000 young per year – once the offspring of their offspring’s offspring and so forth are tallied – notwithstanding an annual mortality rate of 95%. So despite a pitiable reality that only a small minority of pups survive to join a mischief, ample multitudes of the remaining gourmands would gladly help themselves to such a copious buffet of forsaken delectability.

It should be next noted that – given a statistical conformity to the law of averages – these details being mentioned are in fact, all facts.”
― Monte Souder

“The only person I am afraid of in this world is me myself.” That’s Hanna's motto for naughtiness. From Hanna the Guardian of Nature series”
― Hina Nauman, Born To Be Naughty

“Maybe it was because of the speed and danger. Or the psychedelic disco ball and the Beatles. Or the 'Suicide' fountain drinks and the crowded boys bathroom. But Skateland on Lindsey Street was absolutely the place to be in the Sixties.”
― Bill Moore, MORE Memories of an Okie Boomer: Growing up in Norman in the 60s and 70s

“The poltergeist is keen on as much destructive mischief as possible. It is not discriminatory. It will attack the girl who shaped it.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Curious Case of the Talking Mongoose