Neil Gaiman

“He felt her heart beating against his chest. The moment began to transmute, and he wondered if there was something he should do. He wondered if he should kiss her. He wondered if he wanted to kiss her, and he realized that he truly didn't know.”

“Mr. Vandemar showed them his teeth, demonstrating his sunny and delightful disposition. It was unquestionably the most horrible thing Richard had ever seen.”

“He told me not to seek revenge, but to seek the Buddha,' said the fox spirit, sadly. 'Wise counsel,' said the fox of dreams. 'Vegeance can be a road that has no ending. You would be wise to avoid it. And...?''I shall seek the Buddha,' said the fox, with a toss of her head. 'But first I shall seek revenge.”

“All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing." Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on.”

“Somehow, this was one oddity too many. He could accept "Mind the Gap" and the Earl's Court, and even the strange library. But damn it, like all Londoners, he knew his Tube map, and this was going too far. "There isn't a British Museum Station," said Richard, firmly.”

“It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die.”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“Her other mother smiled brightly and the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea.”

“Coraline opened the box of chocolates. The dog looked at them longingly."Would you like one?" she asked the little dog."Yes, please," whispered the dog. "Only not toffee ones. They make me drool.""I thought chocolates weren't very good for dogs," she said, remembering something Miss Forcible had once told her."Maybe where you come from," whispered the little dog. "Here, it's all we eat.”

“Living and seizing to live are imaginary solutions. Existence lies elsewhere.”

“Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.”

“Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.”

“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 assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best.”

“Charitably... I think... sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.”

“I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.”

“Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.”

“You don't have to stay anywhere forever.”

“Some of the things are the same no matter which world you're in, kid. One of 'em is this: The quickest way out of something is usually straight through it.”

“Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.”

“Her skin is cold, and clammy; her eyes are the color of sky, on the grey, wet days that leach the world of color and meaning; her voice is little more than a whisper; and while she has no odor, her shadow smells mucky, and pungent, like the skin of a snake. Many years gone, a sect in what is now Afghanistan declared her a goddess, and proclaimed all empty rooms her sacred places. The sect, whose members called themselves The Unforgiven, persisted for two years, until its last adherent finally killed himself, having survived the other members by almost seven months. Despair says little, and is patient.”

“You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.”

“I guess it's just another one of life's little mysteries.""I'm tired of mysteries.""Yeah? I think they add a kind of zest to the world. Like salt in a stew.”

“This isn't about what is . . . it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things.”

“There are some as are what they are. And there are some as aren't what they seem to be. And there are some as only seem to be what they seem to be.”

“Each of the dancers took a partner, the living with the dead, each to each. Bod reached out his hand and found himself touching fingers with, and gazing into the grey eyes of, the lady in the cobweb dress. She smiled at him.“Hello, Bod,” she said.“Hello,” he said, as he danced with her. “I don’t know your name.”“Names aren’t really important,” she said.“I love your horse. He’s so big! I never knew horses could be that big.”“He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well.”“Can I ride him?” asked Bod.“One day,” she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. “One day. Everybody does.”“Promise?”I promise.”

“Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?”

“To be a good writer... read a lot and write every day.”

“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. ”

“He died alone,' said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. 'It don't matter a rat's ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone.”

“They took hands, the living with the dead, and they began to dance.”

“It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.”

“It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is”

“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.”

“They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew that it was raining. Tristran's heart pounded in his chest as if it was not big enough to contain all the joy that it held. He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her.”

“The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.”

“I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.”

“You have a very open relationship with your fans.""Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers.”

“Actually I didn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he could tell I was extremely cross.”

“You are an analog girl, living in a digital world.”

“The war had begun and nobody saw it. The storm was lowering and nobody knew it.”

“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.”

“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”

“She sat down on one of her grandmother's uncomfortable armchairs, and the cat sprang up into her lap and made itself comfortable. The light that came through the picture window was daylight, real golden late-afternoon daylight, not a white mist light. The sky was a robin's-egg blue, and Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world ... Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.”

“Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.”

“You play your cards so close to your chest," said Shadow, "that I'm not even sure they're really cards at all.”

“The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don't look like much of a minstrel, and you're— pardon me for saying so lad, but it's true— ordinary as cheese crumbs. So it's love if you ask me.”