01UndatedOh, monsters are scared', said Lettie. 'And as for grown-ups...' She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, 'I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.'...We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long books. The kind with no pictures or conversations.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
02UndatedI do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
04UndatedI took the dog out for a walk tonight, and together we wandered across the meadow next door. It was a warm summer's night, dark, and moonless. There were a handful of fireflies flickering intermittently, some so close to me I could see they were burning green as they flew, and some further away, who seemed to be flashing white.And in the sky above them a continual roil of distant summer lightning (the storm distant enough that it was silent) burned and flashed and illuminated the clouds. It seemed as if the lightning bugs were talking to the lightning, in a perfect call and response of flash and counterflash. I watched the sky and the meadow flash and flash while the dog walked ahead of me, and realised that I was perfectly happy...Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
05UndatedAre you happy?” asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes. “Not really,” said Shadow. “But I’m not dead yet.” “Huh?” “ ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ Herodotus.” Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy.” “The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.” “I don’t even judge then,” said Mr. Nancy. “And as for happiness, there’s a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as there’s a hell of a lot of different kinds of dead. Me, I’ll just take what I can get when I can get it.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
06UndatedHe told me that the phrase “the happiest days of your life” referred to your school days.This seemed nonsensical to me then, and I suspected it of being either adult propaganda or, more likely, confirmation of my creeping suspicion that the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
08UndatedNo man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. 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 unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
10UndatedYou attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
11UndatedWhen the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
12UndatedI'm not blessed, or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes; in hospitals and forests and abbatoirs. For some folks death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
13UndatedShe's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
14UndatedYou lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
15UndatedEach of the dancers took a partner, the living with the dead, each to each. Bod reached out his hand and found himself touching fingers with, and gazing into the grey eyes of, the lady in the cobweb dress. She smiled at him.“Hello, Bod,” she said.“Hello,” he said, as he danced with her. “I don’t know your name.”“Names aren’t really important,” she said.“I love your horse. He’s so big! I never knew horses could be that big.”“He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well.”“Can I ride him?” asked Bod.“One day,” she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. “One day. Everybody does.”“Promise?”I promise.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
16UndatedDEATH: "Mostly they aren't too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear."MORPHEUS: "And I am far more terrible than you, sister.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
17UndatedIf you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There's a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
18UndatedFox was here first, and his brother was the wolf. Fox said, people will live forever. If they die they will not die for long. Wolf said, no, people will die, people must die, all things that live must die, or they will spread and cover the world, and eat all the salmon and the caribou and the buffalo, eat all the squash and all the corn. Now one day Wolf died, and he said to the fox, quick, bring me back to life. And Fox said, No, the dead must stay dead. You convinced me. And he wept as he said this. But he said it, and it was final. Now Wolf rules the world of the dead and Fox lives always under the sun and the moon, and he still mourns his brother.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
19UndatedOne grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
21UndatedThe only reason people die, is because EVERYONE does it. You all just go along with it.It's RUBBISH, death. It's STUPID. I don't want nothing to do with it.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
22UndatedFor some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
23UndatedI must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
24UndatedNobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?""Then what died? who are you mourning?""A point of view.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
