Hidden Rules Quotes

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

One and one is two, and two and two is four, and five will get you ten if you know how to work it.

They don't know we're not allowed to use magic at home. I'm going to have a lot of fun with Dudley this summer.

Rules that are never violated cease to be recognized as Rules.

My mom's coming home soon," I said. "We should go to your place." Patch ran a hand across the shadow of stubble along his jaw. "I have rules about who I take there." I was getting really tired of that answer. "If you showed me, you'd have to kill me?" I guessed, fighting the urge to feel irritated. "Once I'm inside, I can never leave?" Patch studied me a moment. Then he reached into his pocket, twisted a key off his key chain, and slipped it into the front pocket of my pajama top. "Once you've gone inside, you have to keep coming back.

Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.

I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.

In new situations, all the trickiest rules are the ones nobody bothers to explain to you. (And the ones you can't Google.)

You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.