"I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge."

"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."

"And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right.Happy Eighth birthday, blog."

"People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe."

"Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of the night."

"You aren't allowed out of the graveyard -it's aren't, by the way, not amn't, not these days-because it's only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this is where those who love you can be found. Outside would not be safe for you. Not yet."

"Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to."

"Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."

"There are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.""They kill themselves, you mean?" said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid."Indeed.""Does it work? Are they happier dead?""Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean."

"The little mutton-chopped man interrupted them to point out that in his opinion good was not the avoidance of evil, but something more positive than that: it was making the world a better place."

"I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time."

"There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker."

"And Desire smiles, and forgets, for Desire is a creature of the moment."

"Destiny sees things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. He knows there are no stories, only the illusion of stories: threads and patterns that seem to appear in the pages of existence given meaning and significance by the observer. Destiny observes worlds and molecules like motes of dust hanging in a sunbeam: every movement, every moment inevitable. Destiny walks the paths of his garden, a place of forks and paths which combine and part, seeing only what is. He is surprised by nothing. There is nothing that can surprise him, nothing that was not already written in his book."

"Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers."

"You're a poem?' I repeated.She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.''Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?''What's your name?''Enn.''So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?"

"I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect."

"But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted."

"As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time."

"I think all - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around."

"So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it."

"Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was."

"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."

"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 adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations."

"Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs."

"I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book of its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with."

"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."

"Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort."

"He is tolerated by the gods, perhaps because his stratagems and plans save them as often as they get them into trouble.Loki makes the world more interesting but less safe. He is the father of monsters, the author of woes, the sly god."

"I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer."

"And then this whole deal of new gods, old gods," said his friend. "You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring the on. The god of guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame. All the stuff they try and land me with. Take a lot of the weight off my shoulders."

"After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place..."

"It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you."

"No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author."

"There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks."

"Slowly gently night creeps up on you, more gentle than light, it helps you realize how much the light hinders you. In the darkness your senses learn when they should quit " in the embrace of the dark everything becomes what it really is. People fear the dark but unlike the light it does not lie to you. In the dark you can go where you long to be."

"In ten years time I'll be (dead) sixty."

"The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk."

"Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it."

"I am hope."

"What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?''Cats don't have names,' it said.'No?' said Coraline.'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."

"Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do."

"She was the storm, she was the lightning..."

"I'm bored," she said."Learn how to tap-dance," he suggested, without turning around."

"Cats don't have names, it said."No? said Coraline."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.There was something irritatingly self-centered about the cat, Coraline decided. As if it were, in its opinion, the only thing in any world or place that could possibly be of any importance.Half of her wanted to be very rude to it; the other half of her wanted to be polite and deferential. The polite half won."

"When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from."

"There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now."

"Mostly you are what they think you are."

"It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing."

"He 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."