Neil Gaiman Quotes (259 Quotes)

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.

Sister Mary chose that moment to come in with the tea. Satanist or not, she'd also found a plate and arranged some iced biscuits on it.

Mr. Vandemar showed them his teeth, demonstrating his sunny and delightful disposition. It was unquestionably the most horrible thing Richard had ever seen.

You've got a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.

There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.

If he didn't care about you, you couldn't upset him.

There's an expression, deja vu, that means that you feel like you've been somewhere before, that you've somehow already dreamed it or experienced it in your mind.

I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a small medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all around wonderfulness. I don't have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.

But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?

There are those who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one..

Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you're in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.

Richard did not believe in angels, he never had. He was damned if he was going to start now. Still, it was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name.

Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.

If I come back, it will be a place, but it won't be a home any longer.

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

In reality the world is made of thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or propriety.

But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the ember in a nursery fire of a winter's evening. I remember them.

When you are scared, but you do it anyway, that's brave.

That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.

Richard wondered how the marquis managed to make being pushed around in a wheelchair look like a romantic and swashbuckling thing to do.

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.

There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.

I'll find you. Don't worry. Just be on your own and I'll find you.

Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I.

It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.

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.

Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.

The cafe door opened. A young man in dusty white leathers entered, and the wind blew in empty crisp packets and newspapers and ice cream wrappers in with him. They danced around his feet like excited children, then fell exhausted to the floor.

She had forgotten them all; forgotten Richard down in the mud, and the marquis and his foolish crossbow, and the world. She was delighted and transported, in a perfect place, the world she lived for. Her world contained two things: Hunter, and the Beast. The Beast knew that too. It was the perfect match, the hunter and the hunted. And who was who, and which was which, only time would reveal; time and the dance.

And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristan Thorn traveled beyond the fields we know...

They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew that it was raining. Tristran's heart pounded in his chest as if it was not big enough to contain all the joy that it held. He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her.

It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.

It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn't coo, or caw, or trill, or song. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.

Her other mother smiled brightly and the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea.

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

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.

So many things to see, people to do.

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

Tristan and Yvaine were happy together. Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse, but they were happy, as these things go, for a long while

It's just harder out there in the world of the living, and we cannot protect you out there as easily. I wanted to keep you perfectly safe...But there is only one perfectly safe place for your kind, and you will not reach it until all your adventures are over and none of them matter any longer.

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

It's easier to lie to yourself when you say things out loud.

Here you go, she said. I don't need it anymore. I'm very grateful. I think it may have saved my life, saved some other people's death.

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.

The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.