But then it occured to him that any progress he had made on his quest so far he had made by accepting the help that had been offered to him.
Someone had once told her that if you look up at the sky from the bottom of a mine shaft, even in the brightest daylight, you see the night sky and stars.
I am Desire, am I not? That is what I am; that is what I do. I make things want things. Where I touch, things want and need and love – drawn to their objects of desire like butterflies to a candle-flame.
I’m an explorer,” said Coraline.
That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realising that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you’re rubbing against worm food. No offense meant.
It was the size of an ox, of a bull elephant, of a lifetime. It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heartbeats.
You’ve got to admit it’s a bit of a pantomime, though,” said Crawly. “I mean, pointing out the Tree and saying ‘Don’t Touch’ in big letters. Not very subtle, is it? I mean, why not put it on top of a high mountain or a long way off? Makes you wonder what He’s really planning.
Are there any ponies in this?” asked my sister. “I thought there would be ponies by now.
Once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed and breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, ‘Be whole,’ and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.
If you’re making mistakes it means you’re out there doing something.
Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don’t take naturally to it.
Rattle his bones over the stones its only a pauper who nobody owns.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people – but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer, in the numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.
Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen.
If you saw two groups of children arguing over which of them could play in some waste ground, would you chose sides?
Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then – our cities and towns cast too much light into the night – but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree.
If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.
Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.
We weren’t arguing,” said the bear. “Because we can’t talk.” Then it said, “Oops.
I feel like I’m in a world with its own sense of logic.