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Neil Gaiman
158 quotes
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are small but we are many, we are many we are small; we were here before you rose, we will be here when you fall.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because," she said, "when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What's your name," Coraline asked the cat. "Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do I know you’ll keep your word?" asked Coraline.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was reality and there was reality; and some things were more real than others.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was England in the autumn; the sun was, by definition, something that only happened when it wasn't cloudy or raining.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... the beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think...I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The map was gone, and the mapmaker, but the land lives on.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It can’t make things any worse.” “If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had to go to the store, I had decided, to bring back some apples — and I went past the store that sold apples and I kept driving, and driving. I was going south, and west, because if I went north or east I would run out of world too soon.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“New Orleans is a real place, which is more than I can say about most of the cities I’ve lived in, but it’s not a safe place, not a friendly one.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And he still thinks, in the little bit of his head that's still him, that he's not a zombie. That he's not dead, that there's a threshold he hasn't stepped over. But he crossed it long time ago.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The average daytime speed of a vehicle through the streets of central London has not changed in four hundred years. It’s still under ten miles an hour.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But where does contagion end and art begin?”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She does not know where any tale waits before it's told. (No more do I.) But forty thieves sounds good, so forty thieves it is. She prays she's bought another clutch of days. We save our lives in such unlikely ways.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So you were in the nick?” said Smith suddenly. “Sorry?” “Prison. Pokey. Porridge. Other words beginning with a P, indicating poor food, no nightlife, inadequate toilet facilities, and limited opportunities for travel.” “Yeah.” “You’re not very chatty, are you?” “I thought that was a virtue.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was cold, in a way that Shadow was starting to become familiar with: colder inside the building than out. He wondered how they did that, if it was a British building secret.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My grandpa sells condoms to sailors He punctures the tips with a pin My grandma does back-street abortions My God how the money rolls in.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama any more. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bod walked back into the graveyard and up the hill, until he reached the Frobisher mausoleum. He did not enter it. He climbed up the side of the building, using the thick ivy root as a foothold, and he pulled himself up onto the stone roof, where he sat and thought looking out at the world of moving things beyond the graveyard, and he remembered the way Scarlett had held him and how safe he felt, if only for a moment, and how fine it would be to walk safely in the lands beyond the graveyard, and how good it was to be master of his own small world.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bod said, "I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want," he said, and then he paused, and thought. "I want everything.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Google can bring you back, you know, a hundred thousand answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so unlikely?”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We picked some pea pods, opened them and ate the peas inside. Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just go with it. It won’t hurt.” I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid unshakably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Will she be the same?” The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the funniest thing in the universe. “Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. “Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”
Neil Gaiman (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source