Neil Gaiman Quotes - Page 6

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?
Neil Gaiman
[Dream] I do not want a grape.[Desire] I could make you want one.
Neil Gaiman
If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait. Until there's nothing left to wait for.
Neil Gaiman
And Desire smiles, and forgets, for Desire is a creature of the moment.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
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
It's astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one simply assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best." -Destruction
Neil Gaiman
In their huge bedroom that night, Tyr said to Thor, "I hope you know what you are doing.""Of course I do," said Thor. But he didn't. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best.
Neil Gaiman
To bite off your shadow is neither easy nor painless. It demands a single-mindedness that is almost unknown in this day.
Neil Gaiman
You're a poem?' I repeated.She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.''Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?''What's your name?''Enn.''So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?
Neil Gaiman
Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?"Neil Gaiman: "Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an au
Neil Gaiman
It's a weapon, I understand?""In the wrong hands, all tools are weapons. In the right hands, everything is a weapon, or nothing is.
Neil Gaiman
Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.
Neil Gaiman
It's hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having.
Neil Gaiman
Yes, you're right. It's part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.
Neil Gaiman
Yes, you're right. It's part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.ü
Neil Gaiman
Leave no path untaken.
Neil Gaiman
This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.
Neil Gaiman
Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
And then this whole deal of new gods, old gods," said his friend. "You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring them on. The god of the 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." He sighed.
Neil Gaiman
Suffering is sometimes cleansing,” said the man. His clothes were casual, but expensive. “It can purify."“It can also fuck you up,” said Shadow.
Neil Gaiman
Hasn't there always been a moon?""Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue...
Neil Gaiman
In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything.
Neil Gaiman
There's a thing that happens in Hollywood, when you hand in a script with magic in it, and the people at the studio who read it say "We don't quite understand... can you explain the rules? What are the rules here? The magic must have rules" and sometimes when they say that to me I explain that I am sure it does, just as life has rules, but they didn't give me a rule book to life when I was born, and I've been trying to figure it out as I go along, and I am sure it is the same thing for magic; and sometimes I explain that, yes, the magic has rules, and if they read again carefully they can figure out what they are; and sometimes I sigh and put in a line here and a line there that spells things out, says, YES THESE ARE THE RULES YOU DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION and then everyone is very happy.
Neil Gaiman
Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires. Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully.
Neil Gaiman
Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.The two are rarely compatible.
Neil Gaiman
When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like and published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn't.)M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...
Neil Gaiman
It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die.
Neil Gaiman
I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.
Neil Gaiman
Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
Neil Gaiman
What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.
Neil Gaiman
Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.
Neil Gaiman
The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.
Neil Gaiman
Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.
Neil Gaiman
I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.
Neil Gaiman
Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.
Neil Gaiman
Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.
Neil Gaiman
Delirium: You use that word so much. Responsibilities. Do you ever think about what that means? I mean, what does it mean to you? In your head? Dream: Well, I use it to refer that area of existence over which I exert a certain amount of control or influence. In my case, the realm and action of dreaming. Delirium: Hump. It's more than that. The things we do make echoes. S'pose, f'rinstance, you stop on a street corner and admire a brilliant fork of lightning--ZAP! Well for ages after people and things will stop on that very same corner, stare up at the sky. They wouldn't even know what they were looking for. Some of them might see a ghost bolt of lightning in the street. Some of them might even be killed by it. Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility.
Neil Gaiman
Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?""No.
Neil Gaiman
But we do not need to recount every sermon and eulogy. After all, you were there.
Neil Gaiman
I am not in my gallery and neither do I hold your sigil. Will you speak to me?
Neil Gaiman
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?
Neil Gaiman
That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.
Neil Gaiman
I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.
Neil Gaiman
They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.
Neil Gaiman
They weren't making much sense; she decided they were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses, but which can go on for ever, if both parties are willing.
Neil Gaiman
There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion.
Neil Gaiman
We...we could be friends.'We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not.
Neil Gaiman
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good t
Neil Gaiman
I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first language, and I had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick og everything. In my dreams I have used that language to heal the sick and to fly; once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed-and-breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, 'Be whole.' and they would become whole, not be broken people , not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.
Neil Gaiman
...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.
Neil Gaiman
I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out.
Neil Gaiman
So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding. (Quindi il giorno divenne un giorno d'attesa, cosa che era, lo sapeva bene, un peccato: i momenti devono essere sperimentati; aspettare è un peccato contro il tempo che deve ancora venire e contro gli istanti presenti che vengono trascurati.)
Neil Gaiman
You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things.
Neil Gaiman