Neil Gaiman Quotes

Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.
Neil Gaiman
I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.
Neil Gaiman
Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.
Neil Gaiman
Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.
Neil Gaiman
You are not dead, until every person who knew you is dead as well." Where did I hear that? It doesn't matter. There is a village in my head.
Neil Gaiman
Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barba
Neil Gaiman
We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
Neil Gaiman
Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of the night.
Neil Gaiman
Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of night.
Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman on librarians as knowledge navigators over time.“And information was hard to find. And it was hard to find because it was like a flower growing in a desert – you had a long way to walk, but a librarian could take you to the flower. Now it’s more like flowers growing in the Amazon jungle and you’re trying to find a specific flower,” Gaiman said. “Anyone who has spent 5 minutes Googling for information and just sees the amount of noise out there starts to realize that actually someone who knows what they’re doing is incredibly useful. And librarians know what they’re doing.
Neil Gaiman
Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.
Neil Gaiman
Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.
Neil Gaiman
It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.
Neil Gaiman
Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman...
Neil Gaiman
He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.
Neil Gaiman
Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.
Neil Gaiman
Black as night, sweet as sin.
Neil Gaiman
The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.
Neil Gaiman
The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.
Neil Gaiman
Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.
Neil Gaiman
you do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone else's time for them.
Neil Gaiman
Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the colour of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop."You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.
Neil Gaiman
So life isn't exciting?" continued Gary. "Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight. I'll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?" He turned and looked at Richard.Richard nodded, hesitantly. "Yeah.
Neil Gaiman
Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight.
Neil Gaiman
Books are really places, make no mistake about that.
Neil Gaiman
After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place...
Neil Gaiman
Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.
Neil Gaiman
Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.
Neil Gaiman
The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.
Neil Gaiman
Oh ... My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.
Neil Gaiman
If there is a moral to this part of the story, and I distrust morals in the same way that I distrust beginnings, it is simply this: know that with which you deal.
Neil Gaiman
Today, fantasy is, for better or for worse, just another genre, a place in a bookshop to find books that, too often, remind one of far too many other books; it is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative.
Neil Gaiman
There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.
Neil Gaiman
The quickest way is sometimes the longest.
Neil Gaiman
Biting's excellent. It's like kissing - only there is a winner.
Neil Gaiman
I'll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters.
Neil Gaiman
CHORONZON: I am a dire wolf, prey-stalking, lethal prowler.MORPHEUS: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing.CHORONZON: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing.MORPHEUS: I am a spider, fly-consuming, eight legged.CHORONZON: I am a snake, spider-devouring, posion-toothed.MORPHEUS: I am an ox, snake-crushing, heavy-footed.CHORONZON: I am an anthrax, butcher bacterium, warm-life destroying.MORPHEUS: I am a world, space-floating, life-nurturing.CHORONZON: I am a nova, all-exploding... planet-cremating.MORPHEUS: I am the Universe -- all things encompassing, all life embr
Neil Gaiman
Now, where do I bring this thing down?" I asked. There was a hesitation, then, "You don't. We didn't design it to return. It was a redundancy we had no need for. Too costly, in terms of resources." "So what do I do? I just saved the Earth. And now I suffocate out here?
Neil Gaiman
Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.
Neil Gaiman
You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.
Neil Gaiman
My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough.
Neil Gaiman
You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.
Neil Gaiman
We have eyes and we have nervesesWe have tails we have teethYou'll all get what you deservesesWhen we rise from underneath.
Neil Gaiman
We have teeth and we have tailsWe have tails we have eyesWe were here before you fellWe will be here when you rise.
Neil Gaiman
We are small but we are manyWe are many we are smallWe were here before you roseWe will be here when you fall
Neil Gaiman
I like stories where women save themselves.
Neil Gaiman
Do not lose hope - what you seek will be found.
Neil Gaiman
I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.
Neil Gaiman
It must be a real betrayal, when your body turns against you. I wonder if she likes flowers. All the bits of you that can go wrong...I don't like flowers, not really. I like growing them, but that's only because I like seeing them blossom, and seeing them
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
The little mutton-chopped man interrupted them to point out that in his opinion good was not the avoidance of evil, but something more positive than that: it was making the world a better place.
Neil Gaiman
The moments of déjà vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down entirely.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.
Neil Gaiman
...Come home, Bod.' ‘I think . . . I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.’ ‘If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,’ was all she said.
Neil Gaiman
If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,” Liza tells Bod.
Neil Gaiman