“It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.”
“Os gatos não têm nomes - respondeu.Não? - perguntou Coraline.Não - respondeu o gato. - Já vocês, pessoas, têm nomes. É por isso que não sabem quem são. Nós sabemos quem somos e por isso não precisamos de nomes.”
“For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.”
“And 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. [...]'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.”
“As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning. ”
“You know you can set fire to the capacity to say.”
“Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings.”
“EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING. YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE. YOUR LUCKY COLOUR IS DEAD. Motto: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.”
“We owe it to each other to tell stories.”
“Pues qué raro que diga eso −Ligur observó las luces traseras, que se veían cada vez máspequeñas−. ¿Confías en él?No.Bien −dijo Ligur. Cómo estaría el mundo, pensó, si los demonios fueran por ahí confiando los unos en los otros.”
“Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognizable after a snowfall; that is that she has made of my life.”
“The World"You know the saddest thing," she said. "The saddest thing is that we're you." I said nothing."In your fantasies," she said, "my people are just like you. Only better. We don't die or age or suffer from pain or cold or thirst. We're snappier dressers. We possess the wisdom of the ages. And if we crave blood, well, it is no more than the way you people crave food or affection or sunlight - and besides, it gets us out of the house. Crypt. Coffin. Whatever.""And the truth is?" I ask her."We're you," she said. "We're you with all your fuckups and all the things that make you human - all your fears and lonelinesses and confusions... none of that gets better."But we're colder than you are. Deader. I miss daylight and food and knowing how it feels to touch someone and care. I remember life, and meeting people as people and not just as things to feed on or control, and I remember what it was to feel something, anything, happy or sad or anything..." And then she stopped. "Are you crying?" I asked. "We don't cry," she told me. Like I said, the woman was a liar."Fifteen Painted Cards From A Vampire Tarot”
“I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine. I feel nothing at all.”
“I watch my heart disappearing into her rosebud mouth. My Valentine's jest somehow seems less funny.”
“She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.”
“I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.”
“Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?”
“He was standing on the pavement outside Nick Farthing's house, his face damp from the thick night mist.”
“Well," he said, "f’r example, if they ask where you’ve come from, you could say ‘Behind me,’and if they asked where you’re going, you’d say ‘In front of me.”
“Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It's pain, It's pleasure, Leave no path untaken.”
“The ties of blood," said Spider, "are stronger than water."Water's not strong," objected Fat Charlie.”
“Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me over.”
“Rain in the graveyard, and the world puddled into blurred reflections.”
“If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”
“He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple.”
“Obviously, until you write Fuck It, We're All Going To Die, the Newbery Medal is still going to go to people like me.”
“Suppose we pick a name for him, eh?" Caius Pompeius stepped over and eyed the child. "He looks a little like my proconsul, Marcus. We could call him Marcus." Josiah Worthington said, "He looks more like my head gardener, Stebbins. Not that I'm suggesting Stebbins as a name. The man drank like a fish." "He looks like my nephew Harry," said Mother Slaughter..."He looks like nobody but himself," said Mrs.Owens, firmly. "He looks like nobody." "Then Nobody it is," said Silas. "Nobody Owens.”
“He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.”
“Even nothing cannot last forever.”
“The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.”
“It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go.”
“It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.”
“He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and fancied that he could see the lights of Wall behind him, wavering and glimmering as if in a heat-haze, but still inviting.”
“There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.”
“Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.”
“I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...”
“I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life.”
“The view changes from where you are standing.Words can wound, and wounds can heal.All of these things are true.”
“In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.”
“He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.”
“Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember.”
“If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There's a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.”
“Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I.”
“Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.”
“Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.”
“Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.”
“I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?”
“We make choices. No one else can live our lives for us. And we must confront and accept the consequences of our actions.”
“We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves.”
“We have teeth and we have tailsWe have tails we have eyesWe were here before you fellWe will be here when you rise.”