Do you ever wonder if this is all there is?” “What?” Richard gestured vaguely, taking in everything. “Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?
It’s easier to say true things in the dark. Spider said, “You know what doesn’t make sense here?” “Everything?
There were dozens of stones of all sizes in the small meadow. Tall stones, bigger than either of the boys, and small ones, just the right size for sitting on. There were some broken stones. The Runt knew what sort of place this was, but it did not scare him. It was a loved place.
Tolkien’s words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm.” – Gaiman on J. R. R. Tolkien.
In May I received an anonymous Mother’s Day card. This puzzled me. I would have noticed if I had ever had children, surely?
The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night. The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness.
Whatever is happening, it can all be sorted out.
You learn anythin’ from all this?” Shadow shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of what I learned on the tree I’ve already forgotten,” he said. “I think I met some people. But I’m not certain of anything anymore. It’s like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head.
We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... Where all it takes is cheap, easily available product – a packet of salted peanuts or a new type of carpet cleaner – to bring immediate, undiluted joy.
Shadow found himself starting to like Smith. He told himself that liking this man was not a sensible thing to do. He had met people like Smith before, people without consciences, without scruples, without hearts, and they were uniformly as dangerous as they were likeable.
Tristan, I can tell you that every man I ever envied when I was a boy has led an unremarkable life. So you don’t fit with the popular crowd. Now, I take that as a very good omen.
There is an enormous tentacle somewhere in these pages.
Power came from the rituals, not from the gods.
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.
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.
And it certainly seems like it would be a nice place to end up, eventually. But there are so many places we have not yet seen. So many people still to meet. Not to mention all the wrongs to right, villains to vanquish, sights to see, all that. You know.
Lettie Hempstock’s hand in my hand made me braver. But Lettie was just a girl, even if she was a big girl, even if she was eleven, even if she had been eleven for a very long time. Ursula Monkton was an adult. It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.
We stumble, but we don’t fall, and we pick ourselves up and we keep walking – walking on a road that is built from the bodies and the dreams of those who have gone before us.
We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.