01c. 1960 ADHe sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. 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. He pulled out his book.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
02c. 1960 ADI wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
03c. 1960 ADLibraries 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.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
04c. 1960 ADIn truth, Kipling's politics are not mine. But then, it would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
05c. 1960 ADThe boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
06c. 1960 ADOctober knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or shutting a book, did not end the tale.Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
07c. 1960 ADThere was the kind of silence there might have been on the day before Creation. Adam stood smiling at the two of them, a small figure perfectly poised exactly between Heaven and Hell. Crowley grabbed Aziraphale's arm. "You know what happened?" he hissed excitedly. "He was left alone! He grew up human! He's not Evil Incarnate or Good Incarnate, he's just...a human incarnate-Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
08c. 1960 ADYou get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
09c. 1960 ADYes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
10c. 1960 ADYou know what my mum once said?’ said Rosie… ‘She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.’And this means…?’Well’, she said. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
11c. 1960 ADI would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,' she opined, 'like having someone else break in one's own pony.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
12c. 1960 ADThere are no whores in Scaithe’s Ebb, or none that consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months.The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there is a fight—and the grog shops to comfort the loser. The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with the sea in a man’s affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
13c. 1960 ADShe wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
14c. 1960 ADLiza Hempstock, who had been Bod's friend for the last six years, was different in another way; she was less likely to be there for him when Bod went down to the nettle patch to see her, and on the rare occasions when she was, she would be short-tempered, argumentative and often downright rude.Bod talked to Mr Owens about this, and after a few moments' reflection, his father said, "It's just women, I reckon. She liked you as a boy, probably isn't sure who you are now you're a young man. I used to play with one little girl down by the duck pond every day until she turned about your age, and then she threw an apple at my head and did not say another word to me until I was seventeen."Mrs Owens stiffened. "It was a pear I threw," she said, tartly, "and I was talking to you again soon enough, for we danced a measure at your cousin Ned's wedding, and that was but two days after your sixteenth birthday."Mr Owens said, "Of course you are right, my dear." He winked at Bod, to tell him that it was none of it serious. And then mouthed "Seventeen" to show that, really, it was.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
15c. 1960 ADThis is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
16c. 1960 ADYeah, you and me, we can ride on a starIf you stay with me, girlWe can rule the worldYeah, you and me, we can light up the skyIf you stay by my sideWe can rule the worldNeil Gaiman / quote ↗
17c. 1960 ADEvery lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
18c. 1960 ADThe heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
20c. 1960 ADHe 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.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
22c. 1960 ADThere are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
23c. 1960 ADJesus. Low-Key Lyesmith," said Shadow. and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. "Loki," he said. "Loki Lie-smith.""You're slow," said Loki, "but you get there in the end." And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and the embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
24c. 1960 ADThe young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
