Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” Quotes (47 Quotes)

He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.

Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.

You shine like a beacon in a dark world.

He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again.

Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slow circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf, as if he were seeing it for the first time. Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus.

You should know that if we do fucking kill you, the we'll just delete you. You got that? One click and then you're overwriten with random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option.

He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.

The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

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

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.

All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.

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

The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience.

As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.

I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

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

Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead

I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don't need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It's what we do.

There was nowhere they could have gone and they went there anyway.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.

I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I'm called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondlir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory; my wolves are Freki and Geri; my horse is the gallows.

There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.

Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again.

I'll be your puppy. What do you want me to do? Chew your slippers? Piss on the kitchen floor? Lick your nose? Sniff your crotch? I bet there's nothing a puppy can do that I can't do!

There's none so blind as those who will not listen.

Don't start anything you're not prepared to finish.

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began.

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

Even nothing cannot last forever.

It's easier to believe in aliens than in gods,

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

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

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.

Everything that is,casts a shadow

It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.

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

Everything that's happened so far has been some kind of especially vivid dream. All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; we must walk that road to the end.

It's not what I'd want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.

You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work.

For some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless tree and dance on nothing until dancing was done.

People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales.

You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What matters is the chaos, and the slaughter.