"If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait. Until there's nothing left to wait for."

"He is holding a book.Inside the book is the Universe."

"Name the different kinds of people,' said Miss Lupescu. 'Now.'Bod thought for a moment. 'The living,' he said. 'Er. The dead.' He stopped. Then, '... Cats?' he offered, uncertainly."

"Everything that is,casts a shadow."

"He couldn't see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn't. And there was never an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it."

"The dread had not left my soul."

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

"I sat in the dark and thought: There's no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones."

"I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort."

"We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries."

"I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I'd include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you've escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.So no, they're not escapist. They're escape."

"But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open."

"The 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."

"I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist-books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are."

"No," said the cat. "Now, you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names."

"I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited."

"We...we could be friends.'We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not."

"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."

"Loki was trying to look serious, but even so, he was smiling at the corners of his mouth. It was not a reassuring smile."

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

"I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' 'You're the television? Or someone in the television?' 'The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.' 'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.'You're a God?' said Shadow.Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said."

"When I was a child, I pestered my elders for stories."

"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."

"Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk."

"I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life."

"If 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."

"I learned the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die.Had Ragnarok happened yet? Was it still to happen? I did not know then. I am not certain now."

"Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent."

"Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night."

"The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming."

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

"He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.**Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all-except possibly on an organic level-had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night."

"Sometimes there is nothing you can do."

"Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she would die of consumption unloved in a boardinghouse in Prague."

"Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down."

"Books are really places, make no mistake about that."

"I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall."

"The 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."

"If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place... Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and believe things that other human beings think they should be burned for believing, and they get to do and believe wonderful things too, and artists, writers, musicians, creators, actors, are nothing if not human beings."

"Will you go back?" asked the Lord of the Gallows. "To America?""Nothing to go back for," said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie."Things wait for you there," said the old man. "But they will wait until you return."

"I 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."

"Mirrors,' she said, 'are never to be trusted."

"M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises..."

"Approaching the state of Delaware, the dreamer is a small dog, dreaming impatiently of a past life, long forgotten, when he sailed tall ships across uncharted. The salt spray of the ocean stings my face."

"Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires. Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully."

"Enter the world of things as they are."

"They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books."

"Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you-even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true."

"Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?"

"I watched him even then as he fell, his face undefeated, his eyes still proud."