Neil Gaiman

“The telephone to Shadow's apartment was silent and dead. He thought about getting it connected, but could think of no one he wanted to call. Late one night he picked it up and listened, and was convinced he could hear a wind blowing and a distant conversation between a group of people talking in voiced too low to properly make out. He said, "hello?" and "who's there?" but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it.”

“If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to think, and that was just the way he liked it; when he thought, his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the best thing.”

“Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod, but still unique.”

“When you love something you just don't want to stop talking about it.”

“There was something empty at the bottom of all her words.”

“The daylight faded slowly: distances collapsed and the world turned indigo and the wind blew cold enough to burn the skin on your face.”

“There's atoms, which is things that is too small to see, that's what we're all made of. And there's things that are smaller than atoms, and that's Particle Physics."Bod nodded and decided that Scarlett's father was probably interested in imaginary things.”

“When you don't know where you're going it always seems longer - you ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after it's over in a flash.”

“It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will take a graveyard.”

“The junkie whine had vanished from his voice now, replaced with a resigned flatness, as if the words were being broadcast from a long, long way away, dead words being sent out on a dead frequency.”

“He spun around. She was leaning against the doorframe, like an attractive yawn on legs.”

“He was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.”

“Do you know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it's easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don't want to have to pass. I want to be alive.”

“I want to be alive again," she said. "Not in this half-life. I want to be really alive.”

“If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.”

“You can know anything. It's all there. You just have to find it.”

“Watch out for that pedestrian!""It's on the street, it knows the risks it's taking!”

“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...”

“Now what?” asked Fat Charlie. “Shall we all join hands and contact the living?”

“Things. They came up. That what things do. They come up. I can't be expected to keep track of them all”

“Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do.”

“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.”

“After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place...”

“I feel like I'm in a world with its own sense of logic.”

“All bookshelves are magical.”

“So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams.”

“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: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.”

“The voice came from the night all around him, in his head and out of it."What do you want?' it repeated.He wondered if he dared to turn and look, realised he did not.'Well? You come here every night, in a place where the living are not welcome. I have seen you.Why?''I wanted to meet you,' he said, without looking around. 'I want to live for ever.' His voice crackedas he said it.He had stepped over the precipice. There was no going back. In his imagination, he could alreadyfeel the prick of needle-sharp fangs in his neck, a sharp prelude to eternal life.The sound began. It was low and sad, like the rushing of an underground river. It took him severallong seconds to recognise it as laughter.'This is not life,' said the voice.It said nothing more, and after a while the young man knew he was alone in the graveyard.”

“I reached out a hand, and touched her. Her body was hard, and slim, and lithe, and her breasts felt like breasts that Gauguin might have painted. Her mouth, in the darkness, was soft and warm against mine.People come into your life for a reason.”

“It’s a way of talking about lust without talking about lust, he told them. It is a way of talking about sex, and fear of sex, and death, and fear of death, and what else is there to talk about?”

“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.”

“When people tell you there’s something wrong with a story, they’re almost always right. When they tell what it is that’s wrong and how it can be fixed, they’re almost always wrong.”

“You are alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.”

“You’re going back?” asked Bod. Things that had been immutable were changing. “You’re really leaving? But. You’re my guardian.” “I was you’re guardian. But you are old enough to guard yourself. I have other things to protect.”

“A man who knows that time and the train wait for no man.”

“You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business.”

“And the state of his bathroom -- I'm not one to gossip, but there are things crusted on his sink that have not simply developed intelligent life, but have in all probability by now envolved their own political systems.”

“You grow up readings about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and just when you think the world's all full of amazing things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nuclear waste hanging about millions of years.”

“Perhaps it's a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies.”

“I suppose the point you grow up is the point you let the dreams go.”

“What," asked Mr Croup, "do you want?""What," asked the Marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, "does anyone want?""Dead things," suggested Mr Vandemar. "Extra teeth.”

“I will dream if I want to, I said, and my death is my own affair.”

“I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.”

“I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.”

“Trolls can smell the rainbow, trolls can smell the stars. Trolls can smell the dreams you dreamed before you were ever born.”

“We were expecting to see you at the market.""Yes. Well. Some people thought I was dead. I was forced to keep a low profile.""Why . . . why did some people think you were dead?"The marquis looked at Richard with eyes that had seen too much and gone too far. "Because they killed me.”

“You know when I said I knew little about love? That wasn't true. I know a lot about love. I've seen it, centuries and centuries of it, and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. All those wars. Pain, lies, hate... It made me want to turn away and never look down again. But when I see the way that mankind loves... You could search to the furthest reaches of the universe and never find anything more beautiful. So yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing, and... What I'm trying to say, Tristan is... I think I love you. Is this love, Tristan? I never imagined I'd know it for myself. My heart... It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it's trying to escape because it doesn't belong to me any more. It belongs to you. And if you wanted it, I'd wish for nothing in exchange - no gifts. No goods. No demonstrations of devotion. Nothing but knowing you loved me too. Just your heart, in exchange for mine.”

“Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. . . . Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art.”

“Are you going to do it? Go on. You have to do it. I bet you won’t be any crapper than I was.”Fat Charlie shrugged, in a way that, he hoped, indicated that he contained within him depths of crap as yet unplumbed.”

“A song can last long after the events and people in it are dust and dreams and gone.”