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?”

“Names come and names go.”

“This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.”

“The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.”

“Nobody's American," said Wednesday. "Not originally. That's my point.”

“Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen.”

“Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.”

“And then they were at Tristran's old home, where his sister waited for him, and there was a steaming breakfast on the stove and on the table, prepared for him, lovingly, by the woman he had always believed to be his mother.”

“You must come to the Vicarage, then, next week," said the vicar.”

“He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley. In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it. . . " Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.”

“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.”

“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 are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.”

“Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth...”

“It is sometimes a mistake to climb; it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt. If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?”

“He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring because yesterday has brought it.”

“What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.”

“None of this is truly happening," he said to Shadow. He sounded miserable. "It's all in your head. Best not to think of it.”

“There were faces at the windows and words written in blood; deep in the crypt a lonely ghoul crunched on something that might once have been alive; forked lightnings slashed the ebony night; the faceless were walking; all was right with the world”

“It's not sipping wine. It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.”

“Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island”

“There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.”

“They might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés”

“Things bloosom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time.”

“Hunchbacks danced at my wedding for luck. It's a thing you don't see nowadays.”

“And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.”

“The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.”

“Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.”

“He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.”

“I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.”

“The world is always ending for someone. It’s a good line. I give it to the father of the child. He says it to his wife. ‘The world is always ending for someone,’ he says. She is trying to quieten the baby, and does not hear him. I doubt that it would matter if she did.”

“I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again. No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.”

“In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.”

“Introduction to bits. Things are going up on the curb, every few months. Maybe. Bottle of the inside of the lines of the landing, not as we can set of brightness. But the houses get repayed, man. Anywhere. There’s nowhere else to be late at a number of me? But it’s visible from the house. It’s early evening, but it crackles and perhaps they own. It means that perhaps the result of bubbly waiting for a few moments. I have to flinch at the forthcoming disaster strikes. Nathan: He travels. While most of the hoarded seconds of the moon given flesh. Inanna is that they own. That which does the theme afterwards. They become bitter. Not a level on a few moments I see. Thank you. Yeah. Arty stuff.”

“For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the bed we wake up in in the morning and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.”

“After a while it sort of began to rain, which is to say that it was the kind of rain that never comes to a decision about whether it's actually raining or not. Driving in it, you would never have been certain whether or not to turn on your wipers.”

“You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

“Love belongs to Desire. And Desire is always Cruel. -Old Man”

“Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you've ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.”

“Have you ever spent days and days and days making up flavors of ice cream that no one's ever eaten before? Like chicken and telepone ice cream? Green mouse ice cream was the worst. I didn't like that at all.”

“I have no plans to love you," said Coraline. "No matter what. You can't make me love you.”

“Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.”

“Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.”

“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”

“You're brave. You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don't care if you are imaginary.”

“I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”

“He..." Richard began. "The marquis. Well, you know, to be honest, he seems a little bit dodgy to me."Door stopped. The steps dead-ended in a rough brick wall. "Mm," she agreed. "He's a little bit dodgy in the same way that rats are a little bit covered in fur.”

“Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.”

“The ducks in St James's Park are so used to being fed bread by secret agents meeting clandestinely that they have developed their own Pavlovian reaction. Put a St James's Park duck in a laboratory cage and show it a picture of two men -- one usually wearing a coat with a fur collar, the other something sombre with a scarf -- and it'll look up expectantly.”

“What happens next?”