Neil Gaiman Quotes

On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep.Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.

~ Neil Gaiman

Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us.

~ Neil Gaiman

It was sometimes said that the grey-and-black mountain range which ran like a spine north to south down that part of Faerie had once been a giant, who grew so huge and so heavy that, one day, worn out from the sheer effort of moving and living, he had stretched out on the plain and fallen into a sleep so profound that centuries passed between heartbeats.

~ Neil Gaiman

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.

~ Neil Gaiman

Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.

~ Neil Gaiman

I doubt I'm any wiser than I was five hundred years back. I'm older. I've been up, and been down, and been up again. Have I learned aught? I've learned from my mistakes, but I've had more time to commit more mistakes.

~ Neil Gaiman

If you're making mistakes it means you're out there doing something.

~ Neil Gaiman

Have you thought about what it means to be a god? asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme (...).

~ Neil Gaiman

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

~ Neil Gaiman

They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn't it?

~ Neil Gaiman

We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.

~ Neil Gaiman

Sometimes you do things you regret, but there's nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on.

~ Neil Gaiman

The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself--his clothes, his manner, his carriage--as a grand joke.There was a dull pain in his wrists and his feet, and he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. There was nothing more to be gained by feigning unconsciousness, and he raised his head, as best he could, and spat a gob of scarlet blood into Mr. Vandemar's face.It was a brave thing to do, he thought. And a stupid one. Perhaps they would have let him die quietly, if he had not done that. Now, he had no doubt, they would hurt him more. And perhaps his death would come the quicker for it.

~ Neil Gaiman

And he said that wasn’t brave of him, doing that, just standing there and being stung,’ said Coraline to the cat. ‘It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.’‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave

~ Neil Gaiman

She looked at the girl in the mirror and the girl in the mirror looked back at her. I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.

~ Neil Gaiman

It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.’ ‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.

~ Neil Gaiman

I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.

~ Neil Gaiman

Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare.

~ Neil Gaiman

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do wit

~ Neil Gaiman

Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

~ Neil Gaiman

I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.

~ Neil Gaiman

It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.

~ Neil Gaiman

To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.

~ Neil Gaiman

Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie's mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing as it did, edible foodstuffs. Coffee? Water? Don't say wax fruit. Wax fruit? Damn.

~ Neil Gaiman

Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.

~ Neil Gaiman

You're weird,' she said. 'You don't have any friends.''I didn't come here for friends,' said Bod truthfully. i came here to learn.'Mo's nose twitched. Do you know how weird that is?' she asked. Nobody comes to school to learn. I mean, you come because you have to.

~ Neil Gaiman

Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments.

~ Neil Gaiman

I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.

~ Neil Gaiman

I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

~ Neil Gaiman

People tend to find books when they are ready for them.

~ Neil Gaiman

The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air--a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.

~ Neil Gaiman

Remember your name. Do not lose hope ---what you seek will be found.

~ Neil Gaiman

I need to know how you did it it. I did it, said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, witch panache and style. That's how I did it.(Shadow & Mad Sweeney)

~ Neil Gaiman

He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in this moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood an Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (You want to see Lucy's tits? asked a voice in his head).

~ Neil Gaiman

If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself.

~ Neil Gaiman

I just want you to know,' said the girl, coldly, 'that whoever you are and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and I shall do whatever is in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.' And then she added, with feeling, 'Idiot.

~ Neil Gaiman

This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.

~ Neil Gaiman

It occurred to me then that the man might not be mad, I found this far more disquieting than the alternative.

~ Neil Gaiman

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particuarly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. In reality the world is made of thousands upon 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 for propriety.

~ Neil Gaiman

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

~ Neil Gaiman