All Quotes

"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... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest."

"The world is always ending, for someone."

"I don't believe in Apocalypses. I believe in Apocatastases. I think it may be the title for The Film. It's a bitch to pronounce, and no-one knows what it means, but otherwise it's a great title."

"Apocatastasis. What it means: 1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation 2) Return to a previous condition 3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution. Think about it."

"We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world."

"“You’ve a good heart,” she told him. “Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go.” Then she shook her head. “But mostly, it’s not.”"

"Unimpressed was his default state."

"“I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the final sanctuary of the terminally inept.”"

"He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him."

"This is the kind of thing you wonder about when you make up things for a living."

"It was also, they added, Very Now, which was important in a town in which an hour ago was Ancient History."

"Even the better protected files corrupt, and the best protected corrupt absolutely."

"And our latest project was Death. It's one of the hard ones—one of the big ones, too, I suspect. Possibly it may even become the attribute that's going to define the Creation for the Created: If not for Death, they'd be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning—a boundary beyond which the living cannot cross..."

"“‘He should not have been destroyed like that. That was wrong.’ “‘It was His will.’ “Lucifer stood. ‘Then perhaps His will is unjust. Perhaps the voices in the Darkness speak truly, after all. How can this be right?’ “‘It is right. It is His will. I merely performed my function.’ “He wiped away the tears with the back of his hand. ‘No,’ he said flatly.”"

"The little folk dare anything", said his friend. "And they talk a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to 'em at your peril, and you ignore 'em at your peril, too."

"When I was very young, somebody — maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie — told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it ... It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go."

"Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end."

"All we have to believe with 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. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end."

"What's your name," Coraline asked the cat. "Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?"

"But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?"

"The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names."

"Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see."

"There was reality and there was reality; and some things were more real than others."

"It was England in the autumn; the sun was, by definition, something that only happened when it wasn't cloudy or raining."

""You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could."

"... the beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat."

"I think...I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt."

"The map was gone, and the mapmaker, but the land lives on."

"I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get."

"“It can’t make things any worse.” “If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend."

"In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving."

"I had to go to the store, I had decided, to bring back some apples — and I went past the store that sold apples and I kept driving, and driving. I was going south, and west, because if I went north or east I would run out of world too soon."

"New Orleans is a real place, which is more than I can say about most of the cities I’ve lived in, but it’s not a safe place, not a friendly one."

"And he still thinks, in the little bit of his head that's still him, that he's not a zombie. That he's not dead, that there's a threshold he hasn't stepped over. But he crossed it long time ago."

"The average daytime speed of a vehicle through the streets of central London has not changed in four hundred years. It’s still under ten miles an hour."

"But where does contagion end and art begin?"

"She does not know where any tale waits before it's told. (No more do I.) But forty thieves sounds good, so forty thieves it is. She prays she's bought another clutch of days. We save our lives in such unlikely ways."

"“So you were in the nick?” said Smith suddenly. “Sorry?” “Prison. Pokey. Porridge. Other words beginning with a P, indicating poor food, no nightlife, inadequate toilet facilities, and limited opportunities for travel.” “Yeah.” “You’re not very chatty, are you?” “I thought that was a virtue.”"

"It was cold, in a way that Shadow was starting to become familiar with: colder inside the building than out. He wondered how they did that, if it was a British building secret."

"My grandpa sells condoms to sailors He punctures the tips with a pin My grandma does back-street abortions My God how the money rolls in."

"If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama any more. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?"

"At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow."

"People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer."

"Bod walked back into the graveyard and up the hill, until he reached the Frobisher mausoleum. He did not enter it. He climbed up the side of the building, using the thick ivy root as a foothold, and he pulled himself up onto the stone roof, where he sat and thought looking out at the world of moving things beyond the graveyard, and he remembered the way Scarlett had held him and how safe he felt, if only for a moment, and how fine it would be to walk safely in the lands beyond the graveyard, and how good it was to be master of his own small world."

"Bod said, "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.""

"Google can bring you back, you know, a hundred thousand answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one."

"I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else."

"Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative, or so we presume, for nobody returns to dispute it. Such is my motto."

"I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so unlikely?"

"I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were."