“I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark”

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

“You musn’t be afraid of the dark.’‘I’m not,’ said Shadow. ‘I’m afraid of the people in the dark.”

“After a childhood reading fairy tales and myths, is it any wonder that when I began to write my own stories I included fairy tales? Fairy tales are storytelling at its most basic. They’ve been with mankind for as long as people have told stories to each other. Fairy tales speak to something intrinsic in humans—they touch our most primitive selves. How else to explain that the Cinderella story is told in nearly every society on earth? To think of fairy tales as merely stories for children is to ignore thousands of years when fairy tales were used to teach morality, to warn, and to entertain both children and adults.”

“I’d believed in that story, the story of us. It was still there,that antiquated fairy tale notion. I was older now, though, and it wastime to let the fairy tale go.”

“When we think about fairy tales, we think about happily ever afters, forgetting the darkness that stories beginning with "once upon a time" so often contain.I tried to protect Shay from that darkness. But there was no way to shield her from the truth: Life is not a fairy tale.”