Neil Gaiman Quotes - Page 3

Our word Tragedy comes from the Greek, tragos-ode: “The song of the goat.” Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.
Neil Gaiman
Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.
Neil Gaiman
But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.
Neil Gaiman
The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not.
Neil Gaiman
Cats don’t have names,” it said.“No?” said Coraline.“No,” said the cat. “Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”There was something irritatingly self-centered about the cat, Coraline decided. As if it were, in its opinion, the only thing in any world or place that could possibly be of any importance.Half of her wanted to be very rude to it; the other half of her wanted to be polite and deferential. The polite half won.
Neil Gaiman
Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?
Neil Gaiman
There are those who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one...
Neil Gaiman
The cat dropped the rat between its two front paws. "There are those," it said with a sigh, in tones as smooth as oiled silk, "who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one - after all, it permits the occasional funny little running snack to escape, from time to time. How often does your dinner get to escape?
Neil Gaiman
She smiled again. "Do you like cat?" she said."Yes," said Richard. "I quite like cats."Anaesthesia looked relieved. "Thigh?" she asked, "or breast?
Neil Gaiman
The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. "Calling cats," it confided, "tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.
Neil Gaiman
What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?''Cats don't have names,' it said.'No?' said Coraline.'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.
Neil Gaiman
I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.
Neil Gaiman
You're playing with fire," she warned him."That's how I know I'm alive.
Neil Gaiman
That's right," said Door. Her cheek lightly grazed and her dirty reddish hair was tangled; tangled but not matted. And her eyes...Richard realized that he could not tell what color her eyes were. They were not blue, or green, or brown, or gray; they reminded him of fire opals: there were burning greens and blues, and even reds and yellows that vanished and glinted as she moved.
Neil Gaiman
Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.
Neil Gaiman
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particuarly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.
Neil Gaiman
I just want you to know,' said the girl, coldly, 'that whoever you are and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and I shall do whatever is in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.' And then she added, with feeling, 'Idiot.
Neil Gaiman
If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself.
Neil Gaiman
Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.
Neil Gaiman
He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in this moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood an Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (You want to see Lucy's tits? asked a voice in his head).
Neil Gaiman
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)
Neil Gaiman
Remember your name. Do not lose hope ---what you seek will be found.
Neil Gaiman
The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air--a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.
Neil Gaiman
People tend to find books when they are ready for them.
Neil Gaiman
How old are you?""About fifteen, I think. Though I still feel the same as I always did," Bod said, but Mother Slaughter interrupted, "And I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Neil Gaiman
I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.
Neil Gaiman
I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
You're weird,' she said. 'You don't have any friends.''I didn't come here for friends,' said Bod truthfully. "i came here to learn.'Mo's nose twitched. "Do you know how weird that is?' she asked. "Nobody comes to school to learn. I mean, you come because you have to.
Neil Gaiman
Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.
Neil Gaiman
Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie's mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing as it did, edible foodstuffs. "Coffee? Water?" Don't say wax fruit. "Wax fruit?" Damn.
Neil Gaiman
To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.
Neil Gaiman
It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.
Neil Gaiman
I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.
Neil Gaiman
But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do wit
Neil Gaiman
Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
Neil Gaiman
I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.
Neil Gaiman
Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare.
Neil Gaiman
It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.’ ‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.
Neil Gaiman
She looked at the girl in the mirror and the girl in the mirror looked back at her. I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.
Neil Gaiman
Because," she said, "when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.
Neil Gaiman
And he said that wasn’t brave of him, doing that, just standing there and being stung,’ said Coraline to the cat. ‘It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.’"‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave
Neil Gaiman
The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself--his clothes, his manner, his carriage--as a grand joke.There was a dull pain in his wrists and his feet, and he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. There was nothing more to be gained by feigning unconsciousness, and he raised his head, as best he could, and spat a gob of scarlet blood into Mr. Vandemar's face.It was a brave thing to do, he thought. And a stupid one. Perhaps they would have let him die quietly, if he had not done that. Now, he had no doubt, they would hurt him more. And perhaps his death would come the quicker for it.
Neil Gaiman
Traveling through the Dragon's Den, it has just been explained that Haroun, the Ifrit, has been caught in a mirror trap. Here is the passage that follows:"So," said Silas. "Now there are only three of us.""And a pig," said Kandar [the mummy]"Why?" Asked Miss Lupescu, with a wolf-tongue, through wolf teeth. "Why the Pig?""It's lucky," said Kandar.Miss Lupescu growled, unconvinced."Did Haroun have a pig?" asked Kandar, simply.
Neil Gaiman
Sometimes you do things you regret, but there's nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Hell is something you carry with you.
Neil Gaiman
They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn't it?
Neil Gaiman
I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.
Neil Gaiman
Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme (...)".
Neil Gaiman
If you're making mistakes it means you're out there doing something.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.
Neil Gaiman
If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.
Neil Gaiman
It was sometimes said that the grey-and-black mountain range which ran like a spine north to south down that part of Faerie had once been a giant, who grew so huge and so heavy that, one day, worn out from the sheer effort of moving and living, he had stretched out on the plain and fallen into a sleep so profound that centuries passed between heartbeats.
Neil Gaiman
Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
I'm not much of a challenge here in the dark.
Neil Gaiman