Writers – we’re much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.
I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can.
All we have to believe is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted.
Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.
Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.
Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley’s opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.
Bod shrugged. “So?” he said. “It’s only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.
You think you know all there is to know about here immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.
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.
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.
Of all the organs, ′ said Nehemiah Trot, ’the tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste our sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue. Go to her! Talk to her!
I am an academic,” said Professor Mandalay, “and thus have no finely developed senses that would be comprehensible to anyone who has not ever needed to grade papers without actually reading the blessed things.
He died alone,′ said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. ‘It don’t matter a rat’s ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone.
It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.
We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.
Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you’ll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.
Fat Charlie wondered what Rosie’s mother would usually hear in a church. Probably just cries of “Back! Foul best of Hell!” followed by gasps of “Is it alive?” and a nervous inquiry as to whether anybody had remembered to bring the stakes and hammers.
Can’t say I’ve ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending.
Sometimes you do things you regret, but there’s nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on.