Neil Gaiman Quotes - Page 5

I need to know how you did it it. I did it, said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, witch panache and style. That's how I did it.(Shadow & Mad Sweeney)

•tThey’re like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and they’re so proud of themselves, and so puffed up from being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes.

I'm a mother," said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, "and I know what I know.

You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly... But — you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar... Ask yourselves, all of you... What power would hell have if those imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?

Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.

Biting's excellent. It's like kissing - only there is a winner.

They believe themselves Lucifer's equals, Cain, all these pitiful little gnats. But there is only one that we have ever owned to be our superior. There is but one greater than us, and to him... to him we no longer speak.

The universe is amply supplied with night.

How do I know you'll keep your word?" asked Coraline."I swear it," said the other mother. "I swear it on my own mother's grave.""Does she have a grave?" asked Coraline."Oh yes," said the other mother. "I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back.

I doubt I'm any wiser than I was five hundred years back. I'm older. I've been up, and been down, and been up again. Have I learned aught? I've learned from my mistakes, but I've had more time to commit more mistakes.

What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have the obligation to use it as best as you can. Don’t you agree?

We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams into words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments.

Loki's green eyes flashed with anger and with admiration, for he loved a good trick as much as he hated being fooled.

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.

But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.

I am Desire, am I not? That is what I am; that is what I do. I make things want things. Where I touch, things want and need and love - drawn to their objects of desire like butterflies to a candle-flame.

On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep.Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.

And then this whole deal of new gods, old gods," said his friend. "You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring the on. The god of guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame. All the stuff they try and land me with. Take a lot of the weight off my shoulders.

I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.

Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.

people tell you so much more when they know you're just about to be dead . and then they talk around you, when you are.

I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out.

Where does contagion end and art begin?

...Because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.

There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women's tale, and it is never told to men.

Sometimes war is necessary to teach us the value of peace. Sometimes you need to learn the real value of diplomacy in avoiding war. And I'd rather my students learned those lessons on the playground than on the battlefield.

I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them.

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

I like stories where women save themselves.

It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future...

It always rains on the unloved-wet dreams-a fishing expedition-she kisses wyverns (the disneyland analogy)-dinner etiquette and chocolate lovers-desire swears by the first circle-"things are changing"-what can possibly go wrong?

Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

It's a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. And that's wonderful.Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.And that's magic.

I'll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.Not that year.Winter hung in there, like an invalid refusing to die. Day after grey day the ice stayed hard; the world remained unfriendly and cold.

We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.

Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.

The quickest way is sometimes the longest.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what /was/ me? And what was watchig?

I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.

Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. 'Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.

That's oak leaf, for bravery. I've got Veronica and Honeysuckle, for fidelity and affection. And that's Peony, for shame. She lives under this rock.""Did you make that up by yourself?""'Course not. That's the language of flowers. Everyone knows that.""No, they don't. I don't.""Everyone used to know. They sent each other messages. Like Bluebells means, 'I'll always love you' and Jasmine means 'We're friends.' and Asphodels... Asphodels are for the dead.

There are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.""They kill themselves, you mean?" said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid."Indeed.""Does it work? Are they happier dead?""Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys...

Right," said Fat Charlie conversationally. "You realize, of course, that this means war." It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far.

Yes, I was scared of the Daleks and the Zarbi and the rest, but I was taking other, stranger, more important lessons away from my Saturday tea time serial. For a start, I became infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds only a foot step away. And another part of the meme was this- some things are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. And perhaps some people are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside as well. And that was only the start of it.

You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things.