"Nobody 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."

"Liberty," boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, "is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses."

"You 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."

"Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear."

"Loki's green eyes flashed with anger and with admiration, for he loved a good trick as much as he hated being fooled."

"Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own."

"Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades."

"And the people who would burn the words, the people who would take the books from the shelves, the firemen and the ignorant, the ones afraid of tales and words and dreams and Hallowe'en and people who have tattooed themselves with stories and Boys! You Can Grow Mushrooms in Your Cellar! and as long as your words which are people which are days which are my life, as long as your words survive, then you lived and you mattered and you changed the world and I cannot remember your name.I learned your books. Burned them into my mind. In case the firemen come to town."

"My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough."

"The 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."

"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."

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

"Adults follow paths. Children explore."

"Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between."

"Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think. Also, I subscribed to a number of learned journals."

"And when things get tough, this is what you should do.Make good art."

"I think that there should have been some nice wumpires," said my sister, wistfully. "Nice, handsome, misunderstood wumpires.""There were not," said my father."

"It's a way of talking about lust without talking about lust, he told them. It is a way of talking about sex, and fear of sex, and death, and fear of death, and what else is there to talk about?"

"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"Right," said Fat Charlie conversationally. "You realize, of course, that this means war." It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far."

"Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't. People are much more complicated than that. It's true of everybody."

"You can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river."

"Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it."

"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)."

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

"I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area."

"He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi."

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

"It's not that they're small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It's not that they're small. It's that we're so far away."

"You're Hell's Angels, then? What chapter are you from?''REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX."

"That's oak leaf, for bravery. I've got Veronica and Honeysuckle, for fidelity and affection. And that's Peony, for shame. She lives under this rock.""Did you make that up by yourself?""'Course not. That's the language of flowers. Everyone knows that.""No, they don't. I don't.""Everyone used to know. They sent each other messages. Like Bluebells means, 'I'll always love you' and Jasmine means 'We're friends.' and Asphodels... Asphodels are for the dead."

"I'm a mother," said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, "and I know what I know."

"Hell is something you carry with you."

"Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me."

"Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?"

"What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?""Stories. And they give me hope."

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

"Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared."

"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."

"You are not dead, until every person who knew you is dead as well." Where did I hear that? It doesn't matter. There is a village in my head."

"All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing." Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on."

"I am not in my gallery and neither do I hold your sigil. Will you speak to me?"

"He 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."

"The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen."

"I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so."

"Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't."

"For as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it's true or not."

"Words save our lives, sometimes."

"You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd."

"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."