Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
How you want your coffee?” she asked her guests. “Here we take it black as night, sweet as sin.
He liked being big and strong. It gave him an identity. He’d been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own. Nobody until Laura, anyway.
Women survive their men. Men – men like him – don’t live long when their women are gone. You’ll see – he’ll just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he’s gone.
In the pale light of the Moon I play the game of you. Whoever I am. Whoever you are. All sense of where I am, of who I am and where I’m going, has been swallowed by the dark. And I walk through the stars and sky... a trinity of dreams beneath the moon.
You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.
He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life’s vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.
Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.
If not for Death, they’d be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning.
She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble.
Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn’t a real woodsman.
Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties. 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.
Being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick some of it up as you go along, and you just make up the rest.
Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.
I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want,” he said, and then he paused and thought. “I want everything.
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.
To bite off your shadow is neither easy nor painless. It demands a single-mindedness that is almost unknown in this day.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a daughter’s ingratitude. Still, the proudest spirits can be broken, with love.
B is for boat, pushing off into the dark. C is the way that we find and we look. D is for diamonds, the bait on the hook.
I never had any flesh and blood children, you know. Only words, and paintings, and images of light that flickered in the darkness, and were too soon over.